The Doppit Almanac · No. 17

Snipit, a daily vine cutting puzzle

Snip the vine, spare the fruit

What it is

One vine covers the whole board in Snipit, an original grown in-house for slot No. 17. It climbs out of a stump, forks through every square, and carries berries and rot on the same wood. You hold the shears, and the shears are the only tool there is.

Snip a joint and everything beyond the cut withers. The commission: keep every berry fed from the stump, cut every patch of rot off to die, and leave the numbers in the margin satisfied to the square.

How it plays

The pruning contract, in brief.

• Your only move is to snip a joint; a snipped stub regrows the same way, so no cut is final.
• Berries must stay connected to the stump. A fallen berry wears a red ring until you mend it.
• Rot must wither; its cross turns from red to ink when it does.
• A margin number counts the squares its line must still lose; it ticks live and reads a check once settled.
• A touch or a hover on a joint previews exactly what you would lose. Nothing commits until you say so.

The difficulties

The vineyard keeps three gates, and a fourth for practice. Easy is pruned in thirty seconds to a minute. Medium takes one to three minutes of tracing wood. Hard is three to six minutes, with cuts that only pay off two forks later. Expert is eleven squares by eleven, and it wants a cut Hard never needs: suppose a branch survives and follow the counts. When that settles nothing, suppose a second branch on top of the first and follow both until a line breaks. A new vine takes the trellis every day, on the house.

Nearby in the almanac: Fellit, Pipeit and Groveit