Fillomino Puzzle Challenge

The solving logic required to solve a fillomino puzzle can be tricky, subtle, difficult to spot, and generally quite difficult... a hard fillomino can be a lot tougher to crack than a hard sudoku puzzle for instance. One of the particularly interesting elements of this logic puzzle, is that not every region needs to have one of its members stated in the starting grid. This means that entire regions will be deduced by the solver whilst going along, and sometimes these can be really large regions - it is great fun to find these out when solving fillomino puzzles!The most common starting point with solving fillominos is usually to look for any cells that have their value forced - for instance if there is a cell of a region trapped between other numbered cells, then the region must come out into one or more of the empty cells. Interesting patterns of the same number can also be useful for making placements - one of the fun elements of fillomino can be working out whether instances of the same number must be members of the same region or in fact must belong to different regions. Marking in the boundaries clearly as you go along is key to solving a good fillomino puzzle. A Fillomino puzzle consists of a square grid in which some of the squares contain a single digit number. To complete the puzzle, a Solver must place numbers in the blank squares so that the puzzle is divided into zones with the area of each zone equal to the number contained within its squares. The zones may take on any shape, but zones having the same area may not touch each other. Each puzzle has a unique solution which does not require any guesswork to achieve.