IHNN's Puzzle Emporium
Monday, March 14, 2022
Puzzle #411 - Arafillomino
Saturday, February 19, 2022
Puzzle #410 - Cave (Half and Half)
Thursday, February 17, 2022
Puzzle #409 - Mirror, Mirror (Aqre)
It took me a while to actually sit down to make a serious Aqre puzzle (since rooms still don't feel right for me with the other constraints) so of course, when I did I went for a very ambitious theme of symmetric rooms, with a 5 on one side and a 2 on the other. It took surprisingly little time to find a working puzzle, but it took significantly longer to find a version that I felt had fair enough logic. It's still really subtle and I'll probably put together a walkthrough for this one to explain the intention at some point later.
Also, Puzzle Ramayan round 1 recently concluded, and I recorded my third place finish, and added a few annotations throughout. If you're interested, feel free to check it out here.
Friday, February 11, 2022
Puzzle #408 - Suspicious Clearout (Uso-One)
Thursday, February 10, 2022
Puzzle #407 - Bonus Gift (NIKOJI)
Wednesday, February 9, 2022
Puzzle #406 - Quartered, To Be Drawn (Simple Loop)
Tuesday, February 8, 2022
Puzzles #403, #404 & #405 - Light Tapas
I actually made these three Tapa puzzles a few weeks ago. The first was the result of trying to find a neat antisymmetric design, the second came after playing around with latticed ?? clues in pzprrt (but made by hand later), and the third was just because I wanted to make a standard Tapa afterward. No extra tricks.
The 111 clue in the last one wrinkles a little bit, but I couldn't find another nice way to make the theme resolve. I normally avoid "21", instead formatting it as 12, but it just had to be 21 here.
Monday, February 7, 2022
Puzzles #401 & #402 - Unspoken Rules (TomTom)
Saturday, January 29, 2022
Puzzles #391 - 400 - MadMahogany's Christmas Tree Conundrum (Shading and Sudoku Medley)
Like the last two years, I took part in the Secret Solver event on Puzzlers Club. This time around, I got MadMahogany, someone I mostly know is semi-active (I think?) on the CTC Discord, and some of their most memorable puzzles they've posted to their blog have been shading or sudoku puzzles. Sudoku is obviously outside my general comfort zone, but whatever, this was the perfect opportunity to go big and make something incredible. So I made a Samurai Sudoku shaped like a Christmas tree with different variants in each subgrid. Rules after the puzzle images.
I also decided to make a collection of 5x5 shading puzzles themed on 12/25 (as close as I could get it) for each shading puzzle variant in the big puzzle. Rules for Nurikabe, Tasquare, Canal View, Nuribou, Kurotto, Kurodoko, Nurimisaki, Mochikoro and Cave can be found linked here, as well as Sudoku. These 9 puzzles were a last minute addition when I finished with time to spare, and I thought it would be nice to have a brief reminder / demonstration of the shading rules before having to dig into the tree itself.This puzzle took me probably 30 hours across several weeks to construct, and I got to work with a couple rulesets I'd never worked with before. Like overlapping grids (somehow this was new to me- many headaches from contradictions across grids though...), most of these number placement variants (Arrows are a huge pain, and Killer is way harder than I thought it would be), and Mochikoro and Canal View (fun and easy, painful and difficult. Though some of the Canal View pain was from the other restrictions, it's hard to make unique!). Special mention goes to the Nurikabe for being an absolutely massive gigantic pain to make unique, and the Cave, and the Kurotto section, and generally huge parts of this puzzle barely work. But it all comes together beautifully and I'm very proud of what I came up with here. And my solver liked it, too. :)
I'd also like to take this space to thank Rever Man for testsolving most of this puzzle before I sent it out, Swaroop for updating Penpa to even support grids this big, and djmathman for making the gift I received, which is really quite excellent.
That's all for now, sorry about the inactivity here, more puzzles soon once I write up the posts for them because I have another 8 waiting already. Errata: added a white kropki dot I thought was unnecessary, but was made necessary due to a bad deduction in completely different section.
Thursday, December 30, 2021
Thoughts on Competition Scoring Methods
With Tapa Train currently running on LMI, I've been thinking about puzzle contests again. On paper, these all measure one thing: how fast people are at solves the presented puzzles. And this tends to be borne out in the results, with the same group of people near the top every time. But the order is variable, and can vary by quite a bit depending on the format. It's not immediately obvious why, but the way results are aggregated and compared make a huge difference to how these things can feel. I'm going to go into all the formats I can think of and try to pinpoint what they're measuring, beyond the obvious. I'll be citing some example cases, often from my own experiences, and also often from cases where the format has not suited me well. That's not to say that I think I deserve a better placement from using a different system, just that I can speak to my own experiences and how the systems have affected me better than I could someone else.