I make NOCTURNE ISLAND, a small browser game with four daily puzzles. Everyone gets the same set, a new one starts at 00:00 UTC, and there’s no account. This post is about BLOOM, the garden one.
How it plays: six pumps and six plants. Each pump is piped to two or three plants, and the pipes are drawn on the board. You set every pump to 0, 1, 2 or 3, and a plant gets the sum of the pumps piped to it. Each pot shows “water / needed” while you change the dials. Too much water counts against a plant exactly as much as too little, so giving it double what it needs scores the same as leaving it dry. A hint fixes one wrong pump and costs 15 points.
How a day’s garden is made: the generator pipes the pumps at random, picks a hidden pump setting, and computes each plant’s need from it (every need stays between 1 and 7). It throws the layout away unless the 6x6 pump-to-plant matrix has full rank, so the hidden setting is the only one that waters every plant exactly. The tests also try all 4096 settings (4^6) on generated gardens and check that exactly one fits.
The part I’m unsure about: because it’s really a small linear system, you can solve it with arithmetic or just by turning dials until the numbers line up. Did it feel like a puzzle to you, or more like homework?
