crossword_fiend who was apparently planning to switch to blogging on this amazing new puzzle as well. However, I couldn't keep others like thedan from ruining the pure, brilliant KenKen puzzle with unnecessary and awkward variants, like Battleship KenKen. Really! Battleship KenKen? It will never catch on.Unfortunately, all the attention led to the notice of some higher powers. I quickly received a C&D letter from the NYT saying that my posting about the KenKen was likely to cut into their profits from the soon-to-launch 1-900-4KENKEN hint number. I tried to convince them about how brilliant the kenken.com theming of puzzles was, and how I should educate the other solvers of the NYT KenKen to notice these things. They had no idea what I was talking about and said I could not continue to post the puzzles with all the digits in the grid (apparently the rules are different with crosswords).
So, instead of anger, I developed a new goal. Thomas Snyder will now outdo the NYT KenKen. We're going big time, baby!
Since this is only Tuesday, I figured I shouldn't go too tricky. But it is 3/3/(3x3) and I figured I could write a nice themed puzzle for that date. I wanted to make sure my audience got to add and subtract and multiply and divide so I got that all in here too. You can do the NYT KenKen today, or you can do this one. I'll let you vote for the better puzzle.
Rules: Fill each row and column with the digits one to five exactly once. The bold regions indicate the value of a mathematical operation performed on those cells in some order. For example, 33+ means that the 11 digits in that region collectively add up to 33. Digits can repeat within bold regions, but certainly not within rows or columns.