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Fighting Fish: An Aquarium-Star Battle Hybrid

Puzzling Asked on August 14, 2021

This is an entry for Fortnightly Topic Challenge #44: Introduce a new grid deduction genre to the community.


UPDATE NOTE: The original image had the upper right indicator that there are two fish per row, column and shape to the left of the fish, which could be interpreted as being an Aquarium clue. It is not…I used the standard Star Battle indication for this unthinkingly. Many, MANY apologies!

This puzzle is a hybrid of two grid deduction puzzles that rely on the partition of a grid into shapes. Aquarium recently appeared on PSE in Stiv’s post. The goal of Aquarium is to shade ("add water") to each shape, regarded as a fishbowl, so that the clues outside the grid indicate the number of shaded squares in a row/column. The catch is that in each shape, either every cell in a row is shaded or is not shaded, and no shaded row can appear above an unshaded row.

Star Battle also made a recent appearance on PSE. The rules of Star Battle, summarized from https://www.puzzle-star-battle.com are simple: place stars in the grid such that each row, column, and shape contains exactly some fixed number of stars, where stars cannot be adjacent, even diagonally.

This Fighting Fish hybrid puzzle asks you to both shade the squares of the grid below according to the rules of Aquarium, and then place two fish in each row, column and shape according to the rules of Star Battle. The extra requirement: fish have to be in water. Note that neither individual puzzle is uniquely determined, but there is a unique solution to the hybrid. I hope you enjoy!

Grid

Solver Notes
I don’t think the puzzle is particularly hard, but I like the need to go back and forth between the logic of the component puzzles. If you really want to get in the spirit, the Unicode for the fish is U+1F41F, ?. Also, I might be stretching the letter of the FTC a little bit, since both component puzzles have technically appeared recently on PSE, but both have appeared only a single time, and I feel this is still in the spirit.

One Answer

Apologies in advance for the length of this answer. Blue is confirmed shaded, green is confirmed unshaded. I did use the Unicode fish.

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Step 8 (in which I demonstrate a contradiction):

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Step 21 (and the solution!):

Correct answer by bobble on August 14, 2021

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