Welcome to the new site!

[admin]

Welcome to our newest site - Clueprint Puzzles

These "murder mystery" puzzles require you to use logic and spatial reasoning to determine the location of every suspect in the house at the time the body was discovered. Whoever is located inside the murder room is your killer.

As with any new puzzle type, I'd really appreciate it if you would post any problems or bugs here or email them to me at puzzlebaron@gmail.com.

Thanks as always!

Stephen

[uigrad]

Wow, what a cool concept for puzzles! Thank you!

It's interesting that we are now allowed to share a link to an individual puzzle. I've never seen that here before! Are points given to players who solve a puzzle from a given link? If so, that seems problematic.

[admin]

Are points given to players who solve a puzzle from a given link?

No points are awarded and no stats saved on shared puzzles.

[uigrad]

Cool, that makes sense

I found a small bug with layout. I'm using Firefox, and I found a situation where hovering over a particular name in a clue causes all the clues flicker rapidly. The puzzle I can reproduce it on is here: https://clueprint.puzzlebaron.com/share.php?c=2T6H23BH

To reproduce the bug, hover over Estelle's name in either clue 1 or clue 5. The first line of clues doesn't normally word wrap, but once Estelle's name is highlighted, then it does. Word wrapping her name though changes your selection, so that her name is no longer under the mouse. It alternates between the two states about 10 times a second for me. Fonts on different machines may make this difficult for another person to reproduce, but I thought I'd at least report it.

EDIT: After your fix, I didn't see it again. Thanks!

[admin]

Great catch - I believe that issue should now be fixed. Please let me know if you see it again.

[memeticoutlaw]

Fantastic addition to the site! The puzzles have been challenging and the logic is fun to master. The UI was a bit hard to grasp at first (the sheer amount of buttons can be fairly intimidating at first, especially coming from the simple "x or o" inputs of Logic Puzzles or Star Battle, the two puzzles I think it shares its DNA with the most), but once I got the hang of it, it was pretty smooth sailing (being able to click and drag the portraits was the real dealmaker here - without that feature, assigning someone to a square would feel a lot more tedious).

[Anachronismatic]

In case these are patterns from a master file that would make a difference constructing these... #21257, Clue 4 seems unnecessary.

[admin]

In case these are patterns from a master file that would make a difference constructing these... #21257, Clue 4 seems unnecessary.

Great catch! I will rework this puzzle and add a deduction method which will better detect these sorts of patterns.

[Cytotoxin666]

Very nice new mode, I really like it! I found a few issues though:
1. A hint that mentions a sum of doors (e.g. "The rooms of A, B and C have a total of 8 doors") seems to naively count the number of doors per room and add them together. That way, a shared door of two rooms is counted twice. That is unintuitive. A shared door between the rooms of A, B and/or C should only count once.
2. In firefox browser, I do not have a button to hand in my solution. I can click hint or check and it may tell me that everything is in order but I cannot see the green button that supposedly sends it.

[admin]

That's a good point re doors, I'll think some more on how we might be able to record those clues.

Re the green submit button not appearing, I can't seem to replicate this in Firefox...could you send me a screenshot of what you're seeing when the puzzle is complete? Note that suspects must be placed in each square by dragging or double clicking, just leaving their initial in one box isn't going to trigger the submit button to appear.

[Anachronismatic]

I may be wrong, but #28172's endgame seems arbitrary for a handful of solutions.

[admin]

I may be wrong, but #28172's endgame seems arbitrary for a handful of solutions.

Thanks for sending this! I do think it is solvable, but I'm willing to admit that it might be right at (or maybe just over) the cusp of what can be considered "logically deducible" without straying into trial-and-error territory.

I played through this puzzle just now and I would imagine you got to this grid state when it started to feel arbitrary, because there's only one move that gets you past this point and it's kind of a doozy.

clueprint screen.png

The next step I would take would come via the overlap of clues #1 and #3 - both of which reference paths to/from Pearl's position, in relation to the murder room, Stephanie and Ruth - and leans heavily on the fact that we've got Stephanie down to only 5 remaining possible positions, all in the Theatre.

With that in mind, consider a hypothetical: Suppose Ruth is in the murder room (either E2 or E3). E3 is always farther from Pearl than E2, because from E3 the only way out of the murder room is through E2. Therefore every path from E3 to Pearl is just going to be an extension of a path from E2 to Pearl. So let's hypothetically place Ruth on E2.

From E2, every shortest route Ruth could take to any of Pearl's remaining squares must go through the Theatre and leave it at one of three exits: E4 (to the Landing), B3 (to the Lounge or the Dining Room) or B4 (to the Atrium). Stephanie can only be on 5 squares of the Theatre. No matter which of them she is on, she is always the same minimum number of steps from each of those exit squares as Ruth, or fewer:

Path to E4: Ruth 4 steps, Stephanie at most 4 (from B3). Ruth cannot be closer to Pearl than Stephanie.
Path to B3: Ruth 6 steps, Stephanie at most 4 (from D3). Ruth cannot be closer to Pearl than Stephanie.
Path to B4: Ruth 5 steps, Stephanie at most 3 (from D3). Ruth cannot be closer to Pearl than Stephanie.

Therefore: if Ruth were in the murder room, she could never be closer to Pearl than Stephanie. That breaks clue #3, which says Ruth needed fewer steps than any other suspect to reach Pearl. Ruth therefore can't be in the murder room.

This then makes Freya the killer, and the rest of the puzzle solves fairly easily from there.

The question then is whether or not this drifts too far into trial-and-error territory. There is always kind of a nebulous boundary between what counts as a logical look-ahead deduction vs. brute force trial and error, which is genuinely unsatisfying and I always try to avoid. In this case I'd fully understand arguments for either side. What do you think?