Saturday, October 28, 2023
World Puzzle Championship 2023 - First of Hopefully Many
Tuesday, October 10, 2023
New Genre Puzzle Pack! (Puzzles #577 - #589)
One of the things I've been doing is accumulating potential rulesets for new genres to introduce. I'd been toying with a few different ways to potentially introduce these, anything from a contest to a book to just single puzzles. Ultimately, a combination of factors forced my hand on this one, so in the past couple days I made another half dozen instances to put together into a 13 puzzle pack. It's larger than an Inaba pack (4 puzzles + example) but not as large as a Palmer pack (30+ puzzles). I think any good genre introduction should really try to show the depth and breadth of that genre, and you really do need a variety of sizes and difficulties to do that. Even here, a lot of the easier puzzles were attempts at writing the example first!
Isowatari Puzzle Pack
Saturday, September 23, 2023
Puzzle Getchu!
Quick post here that will probably go mostly unread, but I have another puzzle contest upcoming in a few days. Information, including the instructions booklet can be found at the contest page on puzcon.jp.
I'm pretty excited to see how this goes, I think this set has some of my best puzzles and is definitely the best contest set I've put together yet, even putting aside that it's themed on one of my favorite games.
So yeah, if this is before October 4th, check out the contest and give it a try! If it's after October 4th, I'll either have posted the puzzles on this blog or will be in the process of doing so.
Thursday, September 14, 2023
USPC 2023 Post-Mortem
Tuesday, August 15, 2023
Puzzle #576 - Tapa (Line)
Serkan posed a challenge to create a 10x10 Tapa Line (Tapa rules + 4 shaded cells in a row is banned) puzzle with as large of an empty space as possible. After the obvious degenerate case of a single shaded cell clued with just one row and column, a couple people tried making serious puzzles. An 8x8 empty middle was found pretty quickly, but I felt 8x9 would be possible. And it was.
The tiebreaker was to be the lowest sum of clues, so a few values are lower than they otherwise need to be. I also showcased a degenerate case that would allow for an arbitrarily large empty region on arbitrarily large grids, even with the constraint that every row and column must have a shaded cell. Really, there is no good formulation of an optimization challenge like this that doesn't end up with a degenerate puzzle allowed!
Tuesday, August 1, 2023
Puzzles #574 & #575 - Tilted Squares (Akari, Choco Banana)
The djmathman was streaming one or two weekends ago, and people were jokingly making meme tilted square puzzles. I contributed one of those but then decided no, I'm going to make something legitimate. So I made an Akari (always a flexible choice) and a Choco Banana (one of dj's favorite genres) that I'd somehow never made one of before? It's a fun genre but man is it hard to get started with this theme.
Monday, July 31, 2023
Puzzle #573 - People Do Read These? (Akari)
Sunday, July 30, 2023
Puzzle #572 - Pairs (Slitherlink)
Saturday, July 29, 2023
Puzzle #571 - Outside the Box (Masyu)
Friday, July 28, 2023
Puzzle #570 - Time for Slitherlink
Thursday, July 27, 2023
Puzzles #568 & #569 - Bite-Sized Pentominous
Wednesday, July 26, 2023
Puzzles #564 - #567 - Turing Test (Nurikabe)
Tuesday, July 25, 2023
Puzzle #563 - Continuing a Trend (Light and Shadow)
This Light and Shadow puzzle actually continued three trends. One, me making Light and Shadow puzzles because they're fun. Two, Rever made a bunch of puzzles with this clue layout in a variety of types which were pretty neat. Three, while hanging out with both Rever and jkitty in VC we started toying with other genres for this layout and, since Light and Shadow had been a recent thing to try, jkitty tried and didn't think it would work too well. So I took a stab at it and made this in about 5 minutes. To be fair, though, I'd already made the previous 5 puzzles which really helped pinpoint a potential starting point, and I did get a bit lucky with the ending working within the constraints of the start.
If this post goes up and there's not a link to Rever's puzzles with the same layout then remind me to link it or bug them to archive their puzzles somewhere already they're too nice to lose to the harsh void of time.
Monday, July 24, 2023
Puzzles #561 & #562 - The Compromise and The Uncompromising (Light and Shadow)
Sunday, July 23, 2023
Puzzles #558, #559 & #560 - Light and Shadow
Saturday, July 22, 2023
Puzzles #556 & #557 - Broken Dynasties (Statue Kurodoko, Domino Context)
Friday, July 21, 2023
Puzzles #554 & #555 - Three? (Tapa)
Thursday, July 20, 2023
Puzzle #553 - Smile (Sudoku)
Wednesday, July 19, 2023
Puzzle #552 - Penalty Heyawake
Tuesday, July 18, 2023
Puzzle #551 - Three of Threes (Slitherlink)
Monday, July 17, 2023
Puzzle #550 - IPC 2023 Round 3 Giant (Shikaku)
Sunday, July 16, 2023
Puzzles #548 & #549 - IPC 2023 Round 3 Extras
Saturday, July 15, 2023
Puzzles #542 - #547 - IPC 2023 Round 3 (Double Choco)
Friday, July 14, 2023
Puzzles #540 & #541 - IPC 2023 Rule Pool Extras
I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to construct puzzles for the Indian Puzzle Championship this year. Before getting into some of the puzzles I prepared, you can acquire the full set of puzzles at the link above. The IPC (and LMI, a phenomenal puzzling site) operate at a loss, so if you want to throw some support their way it would definitely be appreciated.
- Numbers may never be shaded.
- Numbers give the area of the region they're in. (Nurikabe clues)
- Numbers give the number of shaded cells in the up to 8 surrounding cells. (Minesweeper clues)
- Black circles must be shaded, white circles must be unshaded. (Statue Park clues)
- All unshaded cells are connected.
- All shaded cells are connected.
- No two shaded cells share an edge.
- All shaded areas have exactly 4 cells.
Thursday, July 13, 2023
Puzzles #538 & #539 - IPC 2023 Rule Pool
- Numbers may never be shaded.
- Numbers give the area of the region they're in. (Nurikabe clues)
- Numbers give the number of shaded cells in the up to 8 surrounding cells. (Minesweeper clues)
- Black circles must be shaded, white circles must be unshaded. (Statue Park clues)
- All unshaded cells are connected.
- All shaded cells are connected.
- No two shaded cells share an edge.
- All shaded areas have exactly 4 cells.
Wednesday, July 12, 2023
Puzzles #535, #536 & #537 - IPC 2023 Round 2 (Akichiwake, Symmarea)
I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to construct puzzles for the Indian Puzzle Championship this year. Before getting into some of the puzzles I prepared, you can acquire the full set of puzzles at the link above. The IPC (and LMI, a phenomenal puzzling site) operate at a loss, so if you want to throw some support their way it would definitely be appreciated.
Round 2 is traditionally puzzles from the same categories as Puzzle Ramayan that year, but of different types. I picked Made In India (since Akichiwake was recently gaining prominence and it's a Prasanna invention) and Regions (since I like making region division). I started out by making the second puzzle here with a construction that got away from me, in the pursuit of a restrictive theme and layout. I then took that knowledge and used it to make another puzzle that also got away from me a bit, though since I started smaller the final puzzle ended up being much more reasonable, though still one of the harder puzzles in the round at 50/450 points.
Over a month after the IPC, I realized there were two ways to resolve the last value. The original version of the puzzle is linked below - the image and first link are the fixed version, the second link is the original.
Tuesday, July 11, 2023
Puzzles #533 & #534 - IPC 2023 Round 1 (Product Cave, Curve Data)
Monday, July 10, 2023
SO MANY BEES (the full set)
Sunday, July 9, 2023
Puzzles #530, #531 & #532 - So Many Bees Part 8
For secret solver last year, I was assigned to write a puzzle for dylanamite. I did not write a puzzle, I wrote a 26 puzzle set that I'll be posting the full PDF for tomorrow. When Jamie signed Dylan up (Dylan would have anyway) he did so with the comment "please send me so many bees". And so, I sent so, so, so many bees.
Saturday, July 8, 2023
Puzzles #527, #528 & #529 - So Many Bees Part 7
For secret solver last year, I was assigned to write a puzzle for dylanamite. I did not write a puzzle, I wrote a 26 puzzle set that I'll be posting over the next 2 days, ending on the 10th with the full PDF that was sent. When Jamie signed Dylan up (Dylan would have anyway) he did so with the comment "please send me so many bees". And so, I sent so, so, so many bees.