The other half of this round was themed on the Chinese zodiac animals. Rat went unclaimed for a long, long time, so I elected to make a puzzle using the Little Killer sudoku variant rule. Rather than make a sudoku and deal with regions and larger grids or irregular regions, I went with just a Latin Square. Here's a quick example puzzle I also made for the instructions booklet: the rules are pretty straightforward. Place a number from 1 to N (where N is the side length of the grid) into every cell, so that there are no repeats in a row or column. Arrows outside the grid give the sum of all the numbers inside the grid that they point to.
And the actual competition puzzle, worth 20 points. I tried to make it really tricky, but ended up missing a case so the logic is really messy and honestly the cleanest way is just a bifurcation, unfortunately. It's still unique and still a puzzle I made, so here it is.
I also claimed the spot for Horse with an Anti-Knight Tomtom; like with the IPC Killer Doppelblock, I didn't know which genre I wanted to use beyond a latin square type, but Tomtom quickly proved its worth and potential for some crazy theming. I ran into so many dead ends from only a few cages in this construction and it was really painful, even with using f-puzzles to help speed through "easy" anti-knight steps. The final puzzle is actually unique without the 21 cage, but since it's worth 110 points with the extra clue... yeah I think it's necessary for a good puzzle. Reminder everyone, harder/minimal cluing is not always better.
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