Puzzle #646 - Numbers are Overrated (Nurimisaki)

Someone in Puzzlers Club mentioned a Nurimisaki pattern that would force a deduction, which put me in the mood to make one. So I did, finding my own neat pattern that somehow managed to finish without needing any clue numbers. This is such a fun genre.

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Puzzle #645 - S is for... (Slitherlink)

I completely forgot I had this old Slitherlink lying around until recently. It was originally intended for PuzzleDuel until I made a puzzle I liked better for that role, and then this one just say in my spreadsheet for months and months, forgotten. There's not even anything really wrong with this puzzle either, it's just a bit plain.

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Puzzle #644 - Two Good (Akari)

I don't have a witty comment for this Akari puzzle. The reason I made it was I linked a friend pzprrt, messed around and made a bashy puzzle afterwards, and felt bad and wanted to make a legit puzzle. So I made this one, which I like quite a bit.

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I then made something even worse than the other bashy puzzle. Look at it. Just look at it.

Horrifying.

Puzzles #641, #642 & #643 - Almost Symmetric (Masyu)

About 3 months ago at this point, I got a bit obsessed with trying to make a non-trivial Masyu that was almost symmetric in its clue layout, but didn't solve symmetrically. The second puzzle I made was a small one based on a simple yet somewhat advanced idea.

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Another interpretation of the theme would be to have a symmetric clue layout with only a minor "blemish" from being fully symmetric. My third attempt - still posting out of order - ended up with two such pearls and a fill that got a little bit insane in the end.

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Ultimately though, I think my first attempt at this theme was the best. Definitely the hardest break-in of the three, and though the later stages are easier than the prior puzzle that's not really saying much.

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Thus concludes my backlog of unposted puzzles. With any luck, I'll have more queued and ready to go by the time you're reading this, but no promises!

Puzzle #640 - Fourced (Light and Shadow)

Light and Shadow is still such a good puzzle type. I spent a while toying with this layout of 4s and trying to find any good solution for several white layouts, with all white clues being question marks, before finally finding one. The first version was super bashy and I wasn't going to share the puzzle widely, but something compelled me to keep tweaking it and before long I actually did find a fair, albeit hard variant.

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Also, these rules could potentially appear in Islands of Insight, which should launch about a week ago (I'm writing this on January 25th and may not update this space before it goes live). I've worked really hard on that game, especially the puzzle content for the past 3 years and I'm really, really excited for it to be out there for anyone to see.

Sometime around my birthday, I might post a collection of my favorite puzzles from the game. Regardless of your puzzle experience level, you won't be disappointed!

Puzzle #639 - Chained Again (Yajilin)

A few years after the first Yajilin chains on Puzzlers Club (apparently about 4.5 years), the old spreadsheet was rediscovered. Somebody noted that the amount of givens would always be an even number, so... I made a starting point with an odd number, which also served as a way of unsticking the chain, as it must be constructed linearly.

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Puzzle #638 - Too Many Questions (Chained Block)

Some people on Puzzlers Club were making Chained Block puzzles. I realized I hadn't made one before. So I made one.

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Yeah, I don't know either.

Puzzles #636 & #637 - Monkey Madness (Compass Galaxies)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

Monkey Madness is the final level of Ape Escape, taking place first in an amusement park, and ending up in a castle floating in space. The level has 24 monkeys - 11 in the first (bottom) half, and 13 in the second (top) half. It's also huge, taking up 20% of a speedrun, so for the contest puzzle I had to go big. 14x14 was where I started, but was actually too small, so I bumped it up to 16x16. Oh right, the genre choice: I really liked the "one X per region" rule from the Pentominous in So Many Bees, so I brought that back with monkeys instead of bees. It ended up at 40 points, which on finishing pace would be 16 minutes for this puzzle. Interestingly, Ken Endo got here with more time than that and did not solve in time, similar to his performance in Puzzle Zodiac - also arriving at the final puzzle with plenty of time and coming up short. My contests always seem to have a "boss puzzle" at the end that really kicks people around, but it's always a standout and this was no exception: in the feedback I got afterwards, this was the most mentioned puzzle by far.

Rules: Divide the grid into regions along cell boundaries so that each region contains exactly one monkey (shown as a monkey inside a hexagon) and exactly one other clue. A white circle (Spiral Galaxies clue) indicates that the region has 180 degree rotational symmetry centered on the clue. A number in an X (Compass) clue, if given, indicates the number of cells inside that region that are further than the clue in the direction of the number.

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Oh right I also had to make an example puzzle. So I did - it's pretty uninspired, but meh. I needed an example and this was the last one I made, and I knocked out all the examples over 2 days to rush the contest out before WPC. But also, I didn't want to re-use ideas from the main puzzle!

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Puzzles #634 & #635 - TV Tower (Multi-Skyscrapers)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

The penultimate level, TV Tower, is a skyscraper. But I didn't just want to go with a big Skyscrapers puzzle since I felt an 8x8 or larger would be less interesting. I also didn't think I could pull it off well! So I added the multi rule: Circled cells act as clues for all adjacent grids and will have the same value for all grids.

The example had a lot to show and I'm kind of surprised this grid layout even has any solutions, let alone working with such a sparse antisymmetric cluing. I almost like the example more than the contest puzzle.

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The 20 point contest puzzle had to be multiple stacked grids, of course. My first attempt was a pair of 7x7 grids, but after a few hours I found I had no way to resolve the middle. So I scrapped that start and briefly considered three 5x5 grids before discarding that idea - WSPC 2021 did a 3x3 array of these and I had nothing new to add. I then set up three 6x6 grids and thought it looked way too large, so I nerfed it down to a pair of 6x6 grids and went for it. I used the same break-in as the aborted 7x7 attempt since I'd already discovered it, and there was no point not using the things I learned from that failed attempt.

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Puzzles #632 & #633 - Specter's Factory (Yajisan Sokoban)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

The seventeenth level, Specter's Factory, was actually by far the hardest slot to pick a genre for. I ultimately went with Yajisan Sokoban to emulate the conveyor/crate room near the end of the level, but I considered a lot of other genres for this slot. 10 points is probably a bit undervalued for this puzzle, but when I've only had "undervalued" puzzles and no overvalued... eh, testsolve results weighted this one to be about 10 points, not counting my solve on paper with a much harder to read presentation.

This genre is so hard to make a concrete starting point in - coming up with a good start for the example was quite tough for me.

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As for the main puzzle, the "conveyors" around the outside gave a lot of potential starting points that were still tricky to finagle something nice, and even trickier to continue. This was the least solved puzzle in the entire contest, which I think is due to being placed late, being an uncommon genre, and being lower value so lower priority to go for early.

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Puzzle #631 - City Park (Statue Park)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

The sixteenth level in Ape Escape is City Park. City Park is almost objectively the hardest to execute level in virtually any speedrun category (except time attacks, where it's the second easiest - and it used to be the easiest before I found a way to save a lag frame) - digression aside, I wanted this to be tough. Statue Park was also the perfect genre pick and while it's certainly a genre capable of high difficulty, did I know how to set that up?

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Yes, yes I did figure out how to make this standard size puzzle worth a whopping 25 points. Once I hit on the main layout and idea, I kept running into no remaining solutions from very early steps. Going back a bit, it took me probably an hour to find any potential packing for the conclusion of the puzzle. Once I had one I quickly found a family of similar solutions and started setting out to force an interesting one, which took another hour.

This is probably the highlight puzzle from the entire set - and a couple very good solvers at WPC asked me how to break in! Honestly the feedback on Puzzle Getchu as a whole, in person, was extremely validating. I know I said this already but I had such a great time in Toronto, I can't wait to be able to go to another WPC in the future.

Puzzles #629 & #630 - Crumbling Castle (Castle Wall)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

This. This is why I saved Castle Wall for the fifteenth slot, Crumbling Castle. This level is notable for being the first boss level, and also being the second largest level in the entire game. I had actually already made a decently large Castle Wall that I hadn't published, and when I decided I was making this contest, I realized that this puzzle would be a perfect fit. The example took a bit of effort to build something showcasing everything that might show up in the 15 point contest puzzle, even though I knew it was a no gray, fully clued puzzle.

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The thing I really like about this one is that it's a great showcase of contest points being calibrated to expected time, not strictly difficulty.

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Puzzles #626, #627 & #628 - Wabi Sabi Walls

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

The fourteenth level in the game is Wabi Sabi Wall, a bit of a notorious level for newcomers to the speedrun due to having lots of tough jumps over bottomless pits. Because of that, I knew I didn't want this puzzle to be too easy. I promise there's a good reason why I didn't use Castle Wall for this and instead went with Inaba's Walls. Walls is a genre is something I'm quite prone to making silly mistakes while solving, and so my first attempt - shown at the end of this post - just didn't feel right. Not enough trust in myself to set things up for later. The second attempt was much better and ended up being worth 15 points.

The example, on the other hand, was quite painful to make. It turns out a much less dense clue layout can make some areas really hard to clue effectively, who would have guessed?

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Puzzles #624 & #625 - Sushi Temple (Japanese Sums)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

The thirteenth level is Sushi Temple, and is very much a Japanese shrine. Once I got past the idea of using Anglers (fish, ha ha), I went straight into Japanese Sums, which has quickly become one of my favorite number placement genres. It's both so flexible and restricted at the same time, and there's almost always a useful clue to add to disambiguate a problem. Because of that, the example puzzle was a complete non-issue to make, even with a self-imposed constraint of not duplicating a clue value and making sure to show that a question mark is not strictly a single digit number, like in some implementations.

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The 25 point contest puzzle may appear themeless, but it's not. The opening steps and specifically the first few shaded cells form a torii. Honestly, I probably wouldn't have thought to go this route without being aware this is a common shrine element from the Touhou series. Hmmm, that's another idea...

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Puzzles #622 & #623 - Hot Springs (Onsen)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

The twelfth level, Hot Springs, was also extremely obvious: it had to be an Onsen-meguri puzzle. Hot Springs is also one of the more infamous levels in Ape Escape, so I had wanted to make this puzzle extremely hard... but by the time I got to it, I was tending way too hard overall, so made this one easier to compensate, ending up at only 5 points. I still kept the "tall" nature of the level in the puzzle, though, and used loops with 2, 3 and 4 not because they're consecutive numbers, but because that's how many monkeys are in each room! Having room symmetry under these constraints was pretty tough to get to work too, for both the example and main puzzles. The example especially since I needed an empty circle - the example is probably harder, actually.

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Puzzles #620 & #621 - Frosty Retreat (Icewalk)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

The eleventh level is Frosty Retreat, and this is the reason I didn't use an ice genre for the previous puzzle. Between all of the potential options, I felt like Icewalk would be a more interesting choice than something like Icebarn, and wow, is this a genre that doesn't agree with me. I found it to be a major struggle to set anything up that did anything remotely interesting, and while I got there in the end, I'm not sure I'll be making more of these.

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As for the competition puzzle, I wanted a ringed island like the one a UFO monkey starts on, and other than that I just didn't want it to be trivial. I ended up with a 20 point behemoth of a puzzle that met my criteria, after having to patch an alternate solution at the bottom in a way that also made the key steps easier to find.

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Puzzles #618 & #619 - Snowy Mammoth (Four Winds)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

Snowy Mammoth is the tenth level. It has a windy section, so I went with Four Winds. I considered Compass to lean into the "you are lost!" mailbox, or something about an igloo or ice, but... eh, this was what worked best. The example was actually harder to make than the 10 point contest puzzle, something about the layout probably? The contest puzzle ended up with a solid logical theme so maybe that helped too, with always having a clear idea for a "next move" in mind.

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Puzzles #614 - #617 - Dexter's Island (Aquapelago)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

The ninth level in the game is Dexter's Island. I went with Aquapelago over something like Nurikabe (Islands in the Stream) or Shimaguni (Islands) or any other island themed puzzle, partly because I liked the rules, and partly because I wanted to highlight some lesser known types and this creation by Walker Anderson needed a spotlight (I made these before a puzzlink implementation!). As an added bonus, this would let me theme the puzzle in an extra way, by cluing an 11x11 with only 6 clues, for 6/11: the exact requirement.

But first, a simple example.

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The contest puzzle I went with was the hardest of my three options, considering I also thought it was by far the best. It ended up being worth 15 points, which I think is very fair given how the start of the puzzle plays out.

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My first other candidate is a fine puzzle, but it lacked anything really special in the layout or theming that made me want to use it. Still, it was good practice and gave me a bit more familiarity with the genre.

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At some point afterwards, I stumbled into a legit opening deduction that I tried using in a 6 clue puzzle. It was never nice to resolve the rest, unfortunately, so I added a 7th clue in the middle and made it an 11. But that requires counting to 11, which is a pain, so I didn't really want to use this puzzle, either. Another good puzzle, but just not what I was looking for for the contest.

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Puzzles #612 & #613 - Coral Cave

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

The eighth level is Coral Cave. Coral and Cave are both existing puzzle genres. Mashing them up in some way was the most obvious pick for any slot in the entire contest. The only question was in what way they would be mashed up, and I went with the outside clues give the lengths of unshaded groups, in no particular order.

The example puzzle was actually harder to make do what I wanted than the main puzzle here! I tried to make it work with all 4s at first and almost had something, but had made a bad step along the process and had to adjust. There are a lot of rules here and I wanted to show as many as possible in a reasonable puzzle.

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The contest puzzle was actually one of the first puzzles I made for this. I still had designs of trying to make the point values for each puzzle match the number of monkeys in the level (8, in this case, out of 204 total) so wasn't aiming too difficult. It turned out I was overshooting difficulty targets on nearly every puzzle, and so this ended up at 15 points out of 300. No individual step is that hard, but there are a lot and the path can be narrow at some points.

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Puzzle #611 - Crabby Beach (Doppelblock)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

The seventh level is Crabby Beach - a relatively smaller level. Doppelblock is at first an incongruous choice, until Beach -> Sand -> Sandwich -> sum between clues from Doppelblock. It's still a stretch, but a justifiable stretch. This puzzle was worth 10 points - I really wanted to have a good break-in using no edge clues, as Doppelblock almost always relies on edge clues. I ended up only using prime numbers, and went through a lot of struggle keeping that theme alive.

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Puzzles #609 & #610 - Cryptic Relics (Word Worms)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

The sixth level in the game is Cryptic Relics, and while I originally penciled in Letter Weights on the monkey names in the level, that quickly proved to be unworkable. But it led me to another idea, what genre could possibly support the list of monkey names? Word Division is a safe fallback but perhaps less interesting than other word genres. Meandering Words was out because some of the words contained double letters... what could possibly support those?

And then I remembered Word Worms / Worm Search from the first EUSPC (2nd incarnation linked - first doesn't seem to have a live link anywhere). That seemed perfect! Taking the monkey name lists from both the NTSC and PAL versions of Cryptic Relics gave a word list with 91 characters - perfect, that's a rectangle! And there's even a double Z, maybe I could put PUZZLE in my puzzle... several miracles later, I had a 30 point puzzle. The example was much easier to make since I already had some experience - I mostly just wanted to showcase every rule with a much more restricted letter bank.

Rules: Place one letter into every empty cell such that every worm can be found. Worms are words that can be read in a path that may bend and move in any orthogonal direction. Every cell in the grid must be part of exactly one worm. If identical letters are adjacent, even diagonally, they must belong to the same worm.

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Puzzle #608 - Dark Ruins (Light and Shadow)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

The fifth level is Dark Ruins, another sprawling level. The connection here is pretty obvious - Light and Shadow means there's darkness, and so I went with a "dark ruin" aesthetic. There was a time I was considering Nurimaze for this slot and a few other genres that never went beyond "maybe, but nahhh". It kind of had to be Light and Shadow - I have a strong affinity with this type. 10 points is also potentially slightly undervalued, as tests put it at about 12 points and I "had" to round down.

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Puzzles #606 & #607 - Thick Jungle (Tents)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

The fourth level (and first big level) in the game is Thick Jungle, and I actually spent quite a while on different genre ideas before making a Tents. I tried Arboretum first but the genre just does not agree with me and the way I make puzzles. Then I tried helping that by applying a Tents rule as a hybrid (there is a tent in Thick Jungle!) and while I was able to make some good setups with these rules, after a couple hours of trying I found that there would be no way to resolve things uniquely. So, I went with the "boring" option of standard Tents.

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The 15 point contest puzzle was even potentially undervalued - something I'm quite pleased with as the first Tents I've ever made. It took a few tree layouts (in the shape of a tree) to find something that actually worked and wasn't too forcing before any clues, but was forcing with a few clues. I don't know how I got the row and column clues to match.

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Puzzle #605 - Molten Lava (Double Choco)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

The third level is Molten Lava, and I went with the chocolate association of lava cakes for a Double Choco. The contest puzzle was 10 points and I'm quite happy with it, though the version I used was a slight nerf from the original version, since I missed an option.

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The original version isn't that different - just shuffling the right side numbers around - but breaking in is a bit harder. I'll just give an image for this version.