Following on from previous messages some months ago about battleship puzzles, I thought I would share the most obvious strategies that I use when solving the puzzles.
By far the thing I do the most is work down from the longest ship left to place through to the smallest ship, and work out the possible placements. Quite often there is only one placement for the longest ship, and so it can be placed straight away. Also possible is that you know it must be in a certain row or column, and realise that whether it is placed certain cells must be part of the ship and so can be marked in, and correspondingly the surrounding water can be marked in.
Sometimes you will be able to see that there are perhaps three placements for two ships. It can help to pencil them in lightly and see what the implications for surrounding regions would be - quite often you will see that a possible placement will make another row or column impossible and hence eliminate it.
Remember that even if you don't know which way a ship goes - horizontally or diagonally - if you have one segment of it marked in you can always cross off the diagonally adjacent cells which must be water no matter what the orientation of the ship.
The rules above, together with remembering how many ships of each length you have left to place, are the key solving rules for battleships.
I probably do other things too but these are the main things - I'm sure there are lots of clever deductions and rules out there so please do post
How to solve Hanjie Puzzles A fun logic puzzle, hanjies result in a simple piece of grid art being created. If you're new to this puzzle type but are intrigued and would like to give it a go, this video has a walkthrough of how to solve a simple hanjie puzzle to start you on your hanjie-solving adventures...
Hanjie is a fun puzzle, would you like to try the easy example in this video? You can do so here: Easy Online Hanjie Puzzle
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