Puzzle #410 - Cave (Half and Half)

Recently, djmathman finished running Logic Showcase 31, where the requirement was to make a puzzle using the recently popularish variant "Half and Half". In addition to standard Cave rules, exactly half of the cells in each outlined area must be shaded. I almost didn't submit a puzzle for this but found myself with an hour before the deadline, an idea, and a drive to make something neat.

penpa interface

puzz.link interface (Nanro substituted, not recommended)

I did at one point have a unique puzzle without the dominoes in the corners but felt that the extra pair of regions allowed for an improvement to the logic and flow of the puzzle.

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.

puzz.link interface

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.

Puzzle #408 - Suspicious Clearout (Uso-One)

All the way back on August 31st, 2021, Bryce Herdt posted a 4 room Uso-One template. The theme is... obvious. I'd never tried making one before, so I gave it a shot and then sat on the puzzle until then, unsure if I was going to do anything with it or not. After all, it wasn't my theme and the solve is a bit simple. But simple isn't bad and this was the only non-meme puzzle that was made from the layout so, here it is.

puzz.link interface

What a weird type. I really need to get better at dealing with lying clues. This also concludes my backlog of puzzles that I can actually post for now- I have so many good ones waiting to be freed up :)

Puzzle #407 - Bonus Gift (NIKOJI)

MetaTerminal didn't receive a secret solver gift this year. So a bunch of people banded together to assemble a series of mostly hunt puzzles- since that's where things were headed and I don't do hunt puzzles, I didn't help out.

But then when they started streaming a solve of their gift, I felt like putting together an extra puzzle just because, and went with a NIKOJI due to available theming- this is still a weird type to construct and I ran into a lot of dead ends. Though in the end, I made something I think is pretty neat.

puzz.link interface

The extra E and the mis-spelling are unfortunate. But hey, this works.

Puzzle #406 - Quartered, To Be Drawn (Simple Loop)

I felt like making a Simple Loop one day. I made this, and no longer felt like making Simple Loop any time in the near future- it's so hard to make a puzzle work without circumventing earlier deductions that I honestly just gave up.

puzz.link interface

Small compromise aside, I do like how parts of this turned out. I just think I'd need to go much, much bigger to really get anything meaty.

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.

puzz.link interface

puzz.link interface

puzz.link interface

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.

Puzzles #401 & #402 - Unspoken Rules (TomTom)

One of the things I like to do with my puzzles sometimes is question a convention that most, or all puzzles in the genre have. Early on, I made a LITS with internal borders and thought nothing of it until people started discussing if it was a variant or not. Then early on this blog, there are the Moon or Sun puzzles that allow passing through all 0 of a symbol in a region. Now, here's a TomTom that uses negative given values, which is something I don't think I've seen before.

penpa interface      puzz.link (not recommended)

I tried making this between two other TomToms on request for GMP, actually- the first draft was broken (I missed that 3-3-2-1 = -3 as a possibility) because the idea crossed my mind. However, the other two were actually accepted for future use, and I'm really pleased with what I made for the one posted a couple weeks ago.

Puzzle 402 - "The Missing One"