Greetings, gentle patron!
If you are encountering difficulty making progress on my seventeenth ænigma, perhaps you'll find relief in one or more of the following pedagogical aids.
First, I have collected a small assortment of advisory notes, or ‘tips’ as one might say, which are enumerated a bit lower on this page.
Finally, it has been firmly communicated to me that the present ænigma is perceived by many to be substantially more difficult than my prior efforts. I have therefore prepared a small collection of more explicit nudges, so to speak, toward the mental breakthroughs necessary to succeed in your solving.
I trust that these resources will suffice to lift your mental ship off the shoals of perplexity and allow you happily to continue your journey down the river of clarity and decipherment, but if you find that they do not, I invite you to contact my associate, Pavel Curtis, directly for more individualized furtherance.
With my very best wishes for your imminent enlightenment,
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As with so many ænigmas, it is ever so much easier to proceed when one has as much contextual information as possible. In this case, whenever you can determine that a certain square must contain one of two possible digits, I urge you to record that information inside that square, perhaps utilising a graphite pencil or other such erasable instrument. Personally, I do not find it useful so to mark squares that may still be filled in three or more ways, but this is a matter on which you must consult your own preferences.
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In all of my ænigmas, but most particularly in this case, the individual deductions themselves are often quite straightforward, once identified. The difficulty lies in locating the opportunities for those deductions around the grid. Frequently, I myself must attempt many such deductions, at many sites in the grid, before finally hitting upon one that yields success. I fear that my notes walking through the solution of the example may give a false impression, lacking as they do any signs of that search for deductive weaknesses in the conceptual armour of the ænigma. I pray you will not allow yourself thus to be misled.
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As always with my ænigmas, progress toward the solution here will come almost entirely in the form of small, incremental steps, often merely concluding that some square has only two possibly fillings, as mentioned above. I pray you will not endeavour to rush ahead, attempting to guess or otherwise ascertain the assignment of digits to squares within an entire region in one fell swoop. The whole of your solution will come as the sum of many steps; “patience” and “perseverence” must be your watchwords.
Nearly all of the above notes will be illustrated in my detailed walk-through of the example ænigma, once that is available, should you feel the need to observe them being put into action.
Wishing you the best of solving luck,
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