Puzzles #738 - #746 - Santa's Choco Banana

For the Secret Solver puzzle exchange on Puzzle'rs Club this past December, I got assigned Menderbug, who had previously written for me back in 2022. My first idea was to do something with Rail Pool, but before I started working on that idea I had a thought - what if I took the same idea that was made for me - a series of Symmetry Area puzzles on increasingly less regular grids - and applied that to Menderbug's signup comment of  "I like Choco Banana"? Once I had that idea, I had to go for it.

For all of these puzzles, all shaded areas must be convex and all unshaded areas must be concave. The entire pack can be found here.

My original plan was to make a small and large puzzle for each grid shape, and so I tried to focus on interesting logic for the smaller ones and that + a good layout for the large ones. Time pressure ended up pushing back some parts of this plan but the modular nature of the plan meant that I could easily scale back and have something that felt complete.

puzz.link interface

puzz.link interface

Menderbug is also the person who has pioneered triangular Choco Banana among the most, including making a few for GAPP. I definitely felt some pressure to try to deliver something new and interesting here, and while I'm not sure I succeeded I'm quite happy with what I ended up making.

penpa interface

penpa interface

Tetrakis Choco Banana has also been done before, though only with rectangle/not rectangle. I made so many mistaken deductions while trying to make these two puzzles... it's a weird geometry to get to grips with.

penpa interface

penpa interface

The last 3 puzzles are where the rules really start to fall apart a bit, as some of these geometries are really only good for a one-off puzzle. Rhombi worked okay but were prone to paired cell ambiguities, Snub Square actually worked very well and my biggest regret is only having time to make one of those, while Penrose... well, it's much like Rhombi except weirder. Definitely a one-off but a one-off worth exploring.

penpa interface

penpa interface

penpa interface

Overall I'm quite pleased with this set, and while Menderbug immediately thanked me specifically for it (not so secret) I knew that I was revealing my identity with the plan. He also said "I was going to say which puzzle/tiling I liked best, but I don't know, there was something really cool in each of them." after solving, which is very high praise indeed.

Puzzles #735 - #737 - We Are So Back (Double Back Variants)

Continuing my backlog posting of old puzzles I haven't shared, here are the three puzzles I made for Logic Showcase 66. The prompt was to make a puzzle with a Double Back rule, and I took that prompt in three different directions.

The first puzzle I made was a Norinori where the unshaded cells had to be solved as a Double Back. In other words, draw a loop passing through all but 2 cells in every region, that enters and exits every region exactly twice. Cells unused by the loop should be shaded, and each shaded cell should have exactly 1 shaded neighbor. I had a lot of trouble finessing some parts of this to be unique near the end, which was a bit annoying given how nicely the start worked out.

puzz.link interface     penpa interface

The second puzzle I made was an Aquapelago where each region has to have exactly two unshaded components. Originally I dabbled with a fully clueless grid for this but decided a few clues would be an important addition. The first version of this puzzle was also broken, unfortunately, but I was able to fix it.

puzz.link interface      penpa interface

Finally, I knew I wanted to make a proper loop puzzle - not just a Yajilin-style mashup. So I combined Double Back with All or Nothing - solve as an All or Nothing where every region is visited either 0 or 2 times.

puzz.link interface      penpa interface

Puzzles #702 - #734 - Mini Threes Pack

So I've still had a lot of things going on in real life that have generally prevented me from having any time to work on puzzles, including having almost my entire holiday vacation suddenly taken up. Even as I write this I'm recovering from being sick, but being too sick to work but well enough to actually do things is somehow the sweet spot of being able to assemble things I've already previously made, as long as it was just assembly.

A few months ago I made a single puzzle using only a couple threes, and that set me down the path of trying to make a varied, interesting set of 3-only puzzles. Yesterday I put them all in a PDF and, fittingly (but annoyingly) took 3 tries to get everything in I wanted (forgot links once - there are links now!) and had 3 non-unique puzzles (all fixed now - I originally intended to re-test everything, but I was rushed and still recovering and that's a lesson learned for the future). So yeah. Here's a big pack of puzzles and hopefully the final version, thanks to CJK for informing me of the problems with the first versions. I think in the future I'll just use a post like this as a hub for any packs I put out - that way I can at least fix in-place easily.

Mini Threes Pack (PDF)

Puzzle links follow, I will not be adding 33 images to this post nor will I be compositing them all into one image to include. You'll have to check the PDF.

Nurikabe      Canal View     Shugaku      Snake Egg
Cave      Akichiwake      Nurimisaki      New Tren
Kurotto      Mochinyoro      Choco Banana      Shakashaka
Slitherlink      Vertex Slitherlink      Hotaru Beam      Hashi

Geradeweg      Balance Loop      Four Winds      Round Trip

Regional Yajilin      Koburin      Maxi Loop      Turnaround (Full)

Fourcells      Nawabari      Aho      Compass

Fillomino (Borders)      Nanro      Sukoro      San-Anko

Gokigen

Quick Puzzling Update

So, I've mentioned having a huge backlog that I haven't started posting yet. What gives? What, exactly, have I been up to? Well, hypothetical reader, those are great questions that I'm happy to get into a bit here.

So firstly, my laptop charging port was broken a couple weeks ago. This put me largely out of commission for most hobby things I wanted to do with that time, let alone things I committed to doing - more on that in a bit. I did get things fixed a couple days ago but I'm still catching up so haven't had time to prepare posts. However, one of the things I did do during that time was transcribe ALL my unused IOI puzzles worth posting into penpa or puzzlink links. All of them - there are nearly 80 puzzles in this category, so there's a lot. I still need to go through these again to pick out the order to post them, and actually write the posts/prep the images/etc. so this will have to wait until I have a bit of unbroken time. This will most likely be sometime in November / early December as the bulk of my free time will need to go towards Speedromizer prep during November. Obviously, being out a laptop for 3 weeks meant I was out a computer to practice two games for 3 weeks - when there were only 12 weeks to learn in the first place! Not good.

I've also been making a few new things - aside from the obvious work, I wrote some puzzles for another Logic Showcase, and have also been working on a themed set that I'll probably put up in a single PDF or something. And speaking of PDFs and IOI puzzles, I've decided the way I'll share some of my highlights from the game is going to be a printer-friendly PDF, sorted roughly in the order the puzzles would appear in-game, with some thoughts on each puzzle and how they fit into the game. Basically like a typical blog post, but 150+ times and without a solving link (due to the contributor agreement I signed when I joined the project). Unfortunately I don't have access to the internal puzzle database any more, so I can't check for fun anecdotes in the comments field or easily verify a difficulty, and it's also not easy to check exactly which location in-game a certain puzzle is, but I do at least know what enclave something is in and have my enclave/sidequest puzzles separate from the sandbox pile. Man, am I glad I kept a local copy of everything from early on...

Also, X_Sheep has been maintaining a fork of puzzlink with new genres and recently added Slitherlink with Sheep and Wolves, a variant I previously used in Puzzle Zodiac in this post. As I've been doing with new genres or new features, I've added puzzlink links for the new genre to that post and also to this one. If you've already solved these puzzles: great! If you haven't, or maybe haven't heard of that set before - these were the lead puzzles in the set and so the blog publications started with Aries, so let this be an opportunity to try them out. I'm quite happy with both of the contest puzzles here.

https://pzprxs.vercel.app/p?swslither/6/6/16b3b2a5a63b2a65a3b15a6a2b1b53

https://pzprxs.vercel.app/p?swslither/9/9/b2c1b2651a36535a16a52a66b5a6b535a6a5a62a3a516a3b2b5b1c1a6a3b0c5c2

https://pzprxs.vercel.app/p?swslither/10/10/a12c31b2b36c321d21d21d55a1b62d33d02b2a60d35d22d331c05b2b63c13a

So yeah. Lot going on, still recovering from an unexpected productivity loss at a time I really, really didn't need one.

Puzzle #701 - Dumbbell Dichotomy (Regional Yajilin)

This Regional Yajilin puzzle was yet another yet another insomnia puzzle. I'm really surprised that I managed to find this while laying in bed, unable to fall asleep, given how involved some of the logic I found is. Anyway, puzzle!

puzz.link interface

Puzzle #700 - Archipelago (Pentominous)

Let's do this Pentominous puzzle a little differently than usual.

puzz.link interface

The past few years I've played a lot of Archipelago games, which is a platform for generating and hosting multi-game, multi-world randomizers. This is one of the coolest software projects I've ever seen, that constantly expands as more people support more games. I actually played some of the predecessor - that being Berserker's Multiworld (for Link to the Past) before losing interest in that particular randomizer, and having the server sit idle in my Discord list for years.

Then NewSoupVi and Jarno implemented Sigma's Witness Randomizer into Archipelago, and Vi has continued adding new features and quality of life for over 2 years at this point. I really do recommend giving it a try if you want to play an old game in a new way. If you know me, you know I'd done a good amount of speedruns of that randomizer before, so this was a push back into the multiworld space - and at that time, there were about 15 games supported. There's now about 60, and a ton more unsupported or work in progress games. I've even been helping get an implementation for Ape Escape together, having done all the logic (nobody knows that game better than me) and recently even helping with code now that the project has changed hands and I was given direct write access.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is, I made a puzzle using the AP logo as my grid shape, and everyone should go look into it to see if the project is interesting to them. Someone is even working on a world for Simon Tatham's Puzzle Collection with a lot of support for choosing what types of puzzles show up. Now if you'll excuse me, at the time of this writing (September 15th, 3:17 AM) I need to get to sleep so I can wake up in time for a Touhou event where I'm planning on doing an AP game using an Impossible Spellcard Manual and Bumper Stickers, followed immediately by an Ape Escape community game on the most recent world for that - which includes a starting gadget option implemented entirely by me. (update a couple days later: both went very well!)

Happy solving!

Puzzles #697, #698 & #699 - The Shape of an L Dissection

These three are.. a bit strange at first glance, so I'll present the puzzles first with a brief explanation, and then a longer description afterwards.

One night I couldn't sleep, as often happens, and started thinking about puzzles, as also often happens. I ended up thinking about trying to specify a large empty area for a puzzle with only a single rule: divide the grid into L trominos. That's it. I pretty quickly found an empty 6x6.

puzz.link interface      penpa interface

I then wondered if this construction could tile vertically - it could not, but I did find an empty 6x8 - surely this was as big as it could go.

puzz.link interface      penpa interface

Just as I was about to give up and try to go back to sleep again, I had one last idea, and by some miracle it actually worked, and I found a way to specify an entire empty 7x7 space with just L tromino tiling. I wonder if bigger is possible?

puzz.link interface      penpa interface

But why was I even thinking about this sort of shape dissection in the first place? Well, it turns out to have the same answer as to why I jumped straight to region division for LS56, which turns out to be the same reason I gravitated to Light and Shadow-likes a couple years ago. Lunarch has been working on another puzzle game for the past months, and I've been hard at work on the puzzle side of this game as well. There's so much more than just this little teaser shows...

In other news, as of about today I can share up to 172 of my Islands of Insight puzzles, as long as I only provide static images for those puzzles, and do not myself provide a means of solution checking those puzzles. I'll have to filter through my archives for what I consider the best of the bunch, and I'll probably put together a single PDF collection of some of my highlights from the game. This is completely separate from the unused prototype puzzles I alluded to however many posts ago, which will have solving interfaces and solution checking.

I've been busy, even when this blog hasn't been. It's been hard to find the drive to keep updating it given the overlap with what I've been doing for work (spreadsheets for organizing and the like), but I'll try to keep on top of things at least a little better going forward. No more 6 month backlogs. I hope.

Puzzle #696 - Overlooked (Hotaru Beam)

When I was assessing my puzzle backlog for this archive dump, I found that I had an extremely strong milestone puzzle for #700. However, I only had enough puzzles to get to 699. So I asked the Witness randomizer community for a puzzle type to make, and the exceedingly more likely to be sharing the same brain cell as me Exempt-Medic suggested Hotaru Beam. This was an excellent choice, and even moreso considering I somehow had never made one before this!

puzz.link interface

Puzzle #695 - The Other Backlog (Castle Wall)

Last year before the World Puzzle Championship, I printed off or started a few GMP ebooks to get some practice on a few key genres. One of those was Castle Wall, where I solved about two thirds of the book on the plane ride to Toronto. But that left me with some loose papers of unsolved puzzles that just sat there for ages, as I caught up with and finished the puzz.link database, worked through parts of Toketa 11 that I got at the event, the usual contest routines... until, at the time of this posting, about a month and a half ago. I finally just sat down and started finishing these ebooks, and in doing so I obviously did Serkan's giant Castle Wall at the end of the book. There was one particular section that I kept wanting to make a particular deduction that was very close to working, and ultimately was never used in the solve. So naturally, I made a puzzle using that deduction.

puzz.link interface

Now I just need to find progress on the last 4 pencil Tapa LITS in Toketa....

Puzzle #694 - Large Areas Only (Norinuri)

Nearly every Norinuri puzzle has to rely on either low numbers to fill space, or large ? numbers to fill space. At one point, I tried making one with only 10 clues, but couldn't quite finesse a solution grid. In the attempt I did find this one with only large, but not excessively large numbers, and it turned out there was a nice way to clue it, too.

puzz.link interface