Logicsmith Exhibition 4: Circumnavi-Gates

Would you like to try your hand at logicsmithing, and possibly be featured on my blog? Read on!

Your challenge is to compose a uniquely solvable Circumnavi-Gates puzzle (link to rules, Circumnavi-Gates puzzles from my blog). Your puzzle must either be 10x10 with the black cells arranged according to 180-degree rotational symmetry, or 14x24 with no symmetry restrictions. You must also conform to these rules:

* You must have at least 6 gates, and at least 1 numbered gate.
* The white cells must all be one connected region.
* At least one cell from each row and column must be used in the solution path. (Your puzzle must still be uniquely solvable without this restriction.)

You may send more than one puzzle, so if you want to make a 10x10 puzzle and a 14x24 puzzle, go for it! :)

Send your puzzle(s) to glmathgrant[at]gmail[dot]com. For my convenience, if you have OpenOffice.org installed, please send your puzzle(s) by editing this Circumnavi-Gates template. To use it, change the background of the black cells to black, and use three other background colors to correspond to horizontal gates, vertical gates, and the starting/ending cell. (Use any three different non-black colors you like; none of those colors will appear in the final image, anyway.) Then just type in the numbers. Change the font of the starting/ending number to bold Arial Narrow; otherwise, do not change the fonts or other formatting.

Alternatively, here are a blank 10x10 grid and a blank 14x24 grid; you may edit them in any image-editing program and send your puzzle(s) to me as a BMP, a JPG, or a PNG.

Also, if you would prefer to send it as plain text, I recommend using a period for white cells, X for black cells, O for the starting-ending cell, - for horizontal gates, | for vertical gates, and numbers for numbered black cells. Why would you need so many options for sending me a puzzle? I dunno. But I'm offering them. :)

After three weeks (meaning the deadline is January 21), I will post the puzzles that my readers and I have constructed. Good luck, and have fun!