Puzzles #538 & #539 - IPC 2023 Rule Pool

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 also required a new "rule pool" for non-loop puzzles, with a list of possible rules that might be used where the final puzzle or puzzles would use some combination of those rules. The list of rules for shading I came up with were:

• Numbers may never be shaded.

1. Numbers give the area of the region they're in. (Nurikabe clues)
2. Numbers give the number of shaded cells in the up to 8 surrounding cells. (Minesweeper clues)
3. Black circles must be shaded, white circles must be unshaded. (Statue Park clues)
4. All unshaded cells are connected.
5. All shaded cells are connected.
6. No two shaded cells share an edge.
7. All shaded areas have exactly 4 cells.

I took this opportunity to experiment farther with some rule combinations that are less common, and aimed for two options of what to use in the contest. I made a set of three smaller/easier puzzles, and one harder puzzle, with no real preference as to what was used. It turned out, neither - the round ended up using these two from the set of three, and I'll post the bonus puzzles tomorrow.

And by that I mean they're queued up for tomorrow. I'm writing this in mid June.

First puzzle: 30 points, using rules 1 and 6. This isn't a particularly rich ruleset but it's nice for a couple one-offs. I wrote this puzzle on the train to the MIT Logic Puzzle Open too!

puzz.link interface      penpa interface

Second puzzle: 10 points, using rules 3, 4 and 7. While this puzzle is intentionally very breezy, this combination of rules is very close to an original genre I have lying around that I think has some real potential. I'll make some puzzles for that later, but it adds a no 2x2 white rule (giving a way to force more shaded cells) and allows varying the shaded area sizes allowed in a puzzle.

puzz.link interface      penpa interface