My puzzle contest over at LMI, Puzzle Zodiac, concluded recently. The consensus seems to be that the set of 25 puzzles (and 13 examples) is of extremely high quality, and also quite tough as a competition set. This consensus is borne out in the results, as the contest had only one finisher! One of the toughest puzzles in the set was the second Slitherlink (Sheep and Wolves) puzzle, and I'm very pleased with how all of these puzzles turned out. For the puzz.link links, all sheep (S) are replaced by a 4 and all wolves (W) are replaced with a ?.
puzz.link interface penpa interface
This was the example puzzle for the type- I wanted to make a relatively simple puzzle with a touch of antisymmetry.
puzz.link interface penpa interface
Puzzle 1 on the test, worth 30 points, and themed on the Aries sign. I started by placing down all of the sheep and wolves, and then tried to keep the pattern largely intact with numeric clues to specify the rest of the puzzle. It turns out there's a lot of interesting deductions that follow from the layout here.
puzz.link interface penpa interface
Puzzle 2 on the test, worth 60 points, and themed around a domino pattern with sheep and wolves on opposite sides. In contrast to the other slitherlink, where I used the variant rule to drive the layout, I wanted to use the variant sparingly but still have it drive large parts of the solve. My favorite part of the solve is how the left side resolves- there's some intricate steps to discover that I put a lot of effort into trying to create and preserve.
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