Puzzles #449 - 452 - IPC 2022 Round 2 (Yin Yang, Minarism, Haisu)

I was fortunate enough to be offered the opportunity to contribute to and testsolve for the 2022 Indian Puzzle Championship. The second round was for puzzle types that did not appear in the years Puzzle Ramayan series, and I made a Yin Yang, Minarism and Haisu worth 20, 20 and 50 points, respectively.

puzz.link interface

First, the "everGReen" Yin Yang. I didn't want this puzzle to be too trivialized by advanced knowledge and so went with an 11x11. After plunking down the G and R, I found that a lot of the puzzle already worked very nicely and from there it was reasonable enough to find aesthetically pleasing circles for the final corners.

puzz.link interface

Eh, it's a puzzle. There's a neat insight for how to resolve everything and I like the 1-2-3 interactions, but given the chance to do this again I'd have gone for a 7x7 or something instead.

puzz.link interface

Here's the 50 point... no, this was actually a possible puzzle that I offered (after struggling with a 9x9 or larger with a similar theme that just kept breaking over and over) if the round was trending hard, but I honestly wanted to make something better. So I did.

puzz.link interface

Haisu is great. Haisu deserves more attention. Though Haisu in puzzle contests is apparently cursed, as the original draft of this puzzle had 3 solutions that I patched with an extra pair of clues, despite several testsolves not catching the ambiguity. Then the wrong puzzle image was accidentally used in the contest booklet! On the one hand, fortunately it was still mostly rigorous and the extraneous solutions were in a pair, but also... it's a bit annoying having the only ambiguous puzzle in the set, even if it took multiple points of failure to get to that point. Oh well, it happens sometimes. At least the intended puzzle is good.