PUZZLE LINKS: JPZ Download | Online Solver
Way back when I used to make kaidoku more frequently (… over a decade ago) fellow kaidoku enthusiast Joon Pahk had an insane idea to make these harder. You see, normally in one of these puzzles you’d look for unusual letter patterns to help you get a foothold. Joon decided it would be fun to completely remove that avenue from the solver by making all the entries isograms, i.e. words with no repeated letters. We ended up making a few of them and they were … mean, but solvable.
Another innovation in the genre we came up with was the following: what if not every entry in the grid was a common English word? We ended up calling these “variety kaidoku” to distinguish them from the vanilla type. This makes the puzzles slightly more interesting, as they give the puzzles a theme to uncover, and the solver is left wondering which entries are real words and which are not.
I don’t think we ever combined those ideas, so here we are today with an isogrammatic variety kaidoku. Let’s formalize what’s going on in this puzzle:
Most entries in a variety kaidoku are common, lowercase English words. A few entries are not, and they are for you to find. The numbers 1 through 26 each represent a different letter of the alphabet, and instances of a given number stand for the same letter throughout the entire grid.
Impress your family by solving this in front of them! Or, struggle mightily and convince them that this type of puzzle is unsolvable. If you get a good solving time, I’d like to hear about it in the comments!
got this one in a few minutes by hunting for the Q
Glad to hear it! I think either Q-hunting or vowel-sniffing is your best bet on this one.
There are a couple candidates for the Q, and I was stuck for a bit, but postulating the Q and the X and taking a leap from there got me to the end quickly.
That seems to be most people’s experience – getting the Q was the key, and then taking a few guesses on vowels. Thanks for solving!
This one took me 27 minutes, mainly because I kept trying and abandoning different techniques. What finally worked: picking some likely vowel candidates and cycling through them until one particular word jumped out at me. (Having previously marked the rare letters did make the rest of the solve go faster.) Very nice puzzle.
I’m seeing this comment very late but thanks for solving and glad you enjoyed!