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Landing Alignment
The planet that does not exist turns out to be enormous. It hangs in the viewport being unmistakably real, wearing continents and weather, and its surface, the sensors report, has been carved into a neat grid of landing zones. That is the first unsettling thing. Empty planets are not usually zoned.
Each zone needs its own docking frequency, and no two zones in the same row or column may share one; overlapping signals do remarkable things to a descending ship, ranging from scrambled instruments at the cheerful end to, at the other, a hull rearranged into modern art. The autopilot has read the situation and quietly excused itself, displaying the words manual override recommended with what you are fairly certain is smugness.
So it gets done the way the landing crews do it. Find the cells with only one legal frequency remaining and lock those in first. Every placement rules out options across its entire row and column, and each certainty flushes out the next, until the whole grid clicks into order like an argument being settled. Guessing is for people with a second ship.
Double a single frequency and you will spend the evening explaining to the ship's insurer why you are parked, with tremendous precision, inside a volcano. The insurer has heard it all before. That is the second unsettling thing, the one you decide not to examine just yet: for a planet that does not exist, the insurer already has a form for it.
How to play
- Fill every empty cell in the 6×6 grid with a number from 1 to 6.
- Each number must appear exactly once in every row and column. The grid demands order.
- Tap a cell to select it, then pick a number from the picker below.
- Highlighted cells indicate conflicts. Mistakes are counted (and judged).
- Fewer mistakes and faster times earn a higher score.