I'll give it a shot, but IMHO while the logic of "runs" isn't super complex, it is way too hard to see at a glance and so I don't see myself giving much time to this.
Yeah. It's an original idea, but it just doesn't feel playable at all.
I feel that this sentence from the blog post should have made some alarm bells ring:
> Sometimes I fall back on selecting cells randomly until I find one with highly constraining runs.
Clicking through individual cells one by one sounds really tedious, but this also makes it clear that playing through puzzles doesn't build up some ability to see the runs at a glance.
I think the only way you make this work is by eliminating the concept of run being entirely determined by the board layout. There would need to be way fewer (mostly longer) lines, they should always be visible, and they should be set up by the puzzle constructor to be interesting rather than with purely a mechanical rule.
It's an improvement, playble enough that I finished a puzzle.
It still wasn't particularly engaging though, but a purely mechanical exercise in pencilmarking and ticking off the obvious conflicts. It's answering the question of "could you have an irregular layout" rather than "what kind of interesting puzzles can you design only with an irregular layout". There was not a single "oh, wait, this ruleset actually also implies X" deductive leap, no place where it felt like there was some cool emergent property of the ruleset.
I agree. I played one game and it was more frustrating/annoying than satisfying. I just didn’t find it enjoyable and I usually find hard sudoku pretty enjoyable. The run rule makes sense but it just didn’t get any more intuitive the longer I played.
