Puzzles #533 & #534 - IPC 2023 Round 1 (Product Cave, Curve Data)

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 1 is traditionally composed of puzzle genres that appeared in the Puzzle Ramayan events that year. Product Cave showed up as a "classic variant" and I jumped on the opportunity to write one. I love a good Cave puzzle! I spent some time on the train ride to Boston for the MIT Logic Puzzle Open thinking about themes and deductions I could use for this (as well as some stuff I'll post later...) and ended up hitting on some nice steps I could use. This puzzle ended up being worth 45/450 points in the round. As a reminder, the rules are the same as standard Cave, except the number gives the product of the horizontally and vertically visible cells.

puzz.link interface      penpa interface

There were also Curve Data puzzles. This has started to become another signature genre I write, oops. Prasanna placed 2nd overall in the 2022 WPC, so I wanted to honor that with this theming and make sure the puzzle was non-trivial. I, uh, ended up with a 60 pointer that was the highest value puzzle in the round.

puzz.link interface