World Puzzle Championship 2023 - First of Hopefully Many

As I sit down to write my experiences on the 2023 WPC, it's the night of October 27th, almost 11 PM. The championship ended on the 22nd. While some of this delay is because Lunarch - the remote company I work for - was having a meetup/retreat the days after the event, the rest is because I just had too many thoughts to sort through. This was not only my first WPC, but my first time attending any sort of large convention-type event, let alone a gathering of an online community. This might be a bit surprising given how long I've been around the speedrunning scene, but it's true*. I am still yet to ever attend a GDQ. So, the 2023 WPC in Toronto contained many, many firsts for me, and adequately conveying that seemed impossible. Where could I even begin, especially if a standard competition report would leave all of that out?

*MIT Logic Puzzle Open arguably counts, but that both felt and was a lot smaller.

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

Rules: Shade some cells such that all shaded groups are of the indicated size, all unshaded cells are orthogonally connected, and no 2x2 area is fully unshaded. Black circles must be shaded, while  white circles must remain unshaded.