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.
- 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.
The first bonus puzzle (meant to be used with the other two) uses rules 2, 4 and 5. I also tried writing this on the train, but scrapped the original version as I ran into some constraints that proved difficult to work with without larger backtracking available. A couple days later I made this puzzle where I tried for a logically flowing theme.
This second puzzle uses rules 2, 4 and 7. This set really seems to have the strongest potential of the rules I selected, and if it didn't solve like a mashup of Minesweeper and Statue Park I'd probably poke at it more. This one wasn't used for difficulty, as testsolve times would have put this as the hardest puzzle in the round!
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