Hexagony Puzzle Contest Landing Page

Hexagony (formerly known as [Name Redacted] Puzzle Contest) by IHNN and Eric Fox started at June 3rd, 4:00 UTC and ended 1 week later. This is a 2 hour contest with a mystery theme. Information on how it was run, along with the puzzle rules can be found in the instructions booklet.

Instructions Booklet  Puzzle Booklet  Solutions Booklet

The entry period is officially closed- thank you to everyone who participated! There were 95 competitive entrants, and 34 casual solvers.

For the full results, check this post.

Here are the top 20:

1.	EKBM	650	1:51:40	30	30
2.	Freddie Hand	565	1:56:12	28	30
3.	Walker	515	1:57:01	28	28
4.	rob	445	1:57:54	24	26
4.	Tiralmo	445	1:58:02	24	26
4.	EctoPlasma	445	1:59:04	25	25
7.	Prasanna Seshadri	435	2:13:08	24	24
8.	Anderson	395	1:59:30	21	21
9.	montelucci	390	1:58:14	22	24
10.	Wei-Hwa Huang/onigame	385	1:52:53	20	20
11.	Ben Cosman	370	1:58:25	21	21
12.	apiad	350	1:56:16	20	21
13.	Vincent	345	1:56:31	19	19
14.	tckmn	340	1:57:59	22	22
15.	Will/TheGreatEscaper	330	1:51:34	19	21
15.	Timjamiller	330	1:58:42	20	20
17.	Nikola Zivanovic	320	1:55:38	18	19
17.	Joseph Howard	320	1:56:00	20	21
17.	qw014052	320	1:59:06	17	19
17.	pleiades	320	1:59:26	18	19

Puzzle #351 - Tapa-Like Pentominous

Logic Showcase 25 recently concluded, with tasked people with taking Tapa style clues and mixing them with another puzzle type that doesn't normally have them. I immediately knew I wanted to make a region division puzzle, and settled on Pentominous since I thought it would give the right amount of push and pull. The rules for this puzzle are simple: divide the grid up into pentominoes, so that pentominoes that are the same shape do not share an edge. Numbered clues give the continuous sizes of regions around that clue.

penpa interface

The vertex clues were a really sad addition that I needed to disambiguate the corners at the end- I tried a lot of different options, from giving a few borders, to a pair of cipher clues, to adding an outer frame and placing clues there, to reworking existing clue values to force things, and nothing else really worked as well for the logic. It's a bit of a kludge but I still think the solve is nice.

Upcoming Puzzle Contest Announcement!

I'm a bit excited.

Over the past couple months, Eric Fox and I have put together a puzzle contest. It will run from June 3rd through June 9th, and you can find out all the details in the instructions booklet here. I gave the full set a testsolve while getting solution code rows and it was some of the most fun I've had solving puzzles in a while- and even if you don't want to compete, there's always the option to get the puzzles to solve on your own time.

I hope to see you all enjoying this in the future- as usual, the puzzle constructing was super fun, and setting up the necessary back-end has been a ton of extra effort. I think it's worth it though- the response to the initial announcement and this updated instructions booklet has been emphatically positive.

The logic puzzle community is just...

...it's a great community. People are always so willing to help out with anything, and there's always a positive response to new things being shared. Thanks again everyone- this is the kind of project I'd undertake on my own to see it exist in the world, but being able to do it collaboratively, and share it with this amazing community makes it so much better.

Puzzle #350 - Making a Puzzle is as (Easy as ABC)

So, 350 puzzles. That's a big milestone. Maybe I'd have today's puzzle be for hyping up my upcoming puzzle contest, but no, I'm planning on posting about that once the final instructions booklet is ready. Maybe today would have another giant puzzle, or some crazy hybrid rules.

puzz.link interface

Or maybe, today I'll take a moment to talk about the construction process of a puzzle like this, and peel back the curtain. Not every puzzle comes out exactly the way I want it to and I often have to backtrack, and this puzzle was no exception.