Even though I've already done a Puzzle Zodiac before and wasn't too enthused by this theme, I still made 3 puzzles for the zodiac signs side of things. NIKOJI is otherwise known as Gemini Block, which was a type I was unaware of at the time of my original Puzzle Zodiac. The bottom row not being a word was kind of annoying, but I tried using Qat to find any words that could work and none existed. This was worth 30 points in the round.
Cats like to curl up in corners. Nurimisaki is a type all about corners. It's a bit of a stretch but I like the genre and had originally thought of the type for PZ, even though I went with Akari at the time. I checked with some solver assistance to see if there was any way of avoiding the extra circle in the top left corner and unfortunately found that it was impossible to specify that corner without another clue. Puzzle is worth 25 points.
To round out the comparison, I grabbed Libra to make a Balance Loop worth 50 points. This was one of the biggest missed opportunities of the original PZ in the name of genre balance, and while I don't regret my old choice of Minarism... this Balance Loop is way, way better. I did have a working version without that center clue at one point, but this required neutering a lot of the logic in the second half of the solve, so I sacrificed the purity of the theming for the sake of a much better puzzle. In general I skewed a bit larger on grid size this 24HPC to try to prevent undershooting round length again, and as a whole we succeeded - the rounds were maybe a bit oversized, but well within acceptable ranges for the 24HPC as a whole.
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