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This is a Statue Park puzzle (originally constructed for the 2019 24-Hour Puzzle Championship, as part of a Tarot card themed set -- no prizes for guessing which rank this puzzle was).

Rules of Statue Park:

  • Shade some cells of the grid to form the given set of pieces. Pieces may be rotated or reflected.
  • Pieces cannot be orthogonally adjacent (though they can touch at a corner).
  • All unshaded cells must be (orthogonally) connected.
  • Any cells with black circles must be shaded; any cells with white circles must be unshaded.

6x15 Statue Park puzzle, with piece bank that looks like "FIVE."

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1 Answer 1

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I believe this does the trick:

soln

Rough line of reasoning:

The whole width of the puzzle is just enough to fit the four letters upright (putting any of them sideways won't work). The problem is the last 2 x 1 piece. This must go in the gap between two letters somehow.

Observe that for the white squares to stay contiguous, the I must be the second letter. It can't fit in the third space, and if it were in the first or fourth then it would close off a set of white squares.

With the I in place, we conjecture that the concave shape of the I's sides will permit the fitting of the 2 x 1 piece, combined with the empty space in the bottom half of the F. A quick thought confirms that the 2 x 1 piece cannot possibly fit between any other two letters. After trying to unsuccessfully fit the F in the leftmost spot such that there is room for the 2 x 1 piece, we can deduce that the F must be in the third place, to the immediate right of the I. We can find the correct placement of the F and the 2 x 1 piece from there. The rest is trivial.

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  • $\begingroup$ That's correct, and exactly the intended logic! $\endgroup$
    – Deusovi
    May 20, 2019 at 0:16

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