Puzzle #411 - Arafillomino

Yesterday, an Araf (Different Neighbors) of mine was posted as a Sunday Stumper on Grandmaster Puzzles. Normally these links to GMP are pretty short, but I wanted to take a bit of time to talk about the construction process and some of the issues and obstacles I ran into in creating this. Obviously, solution details will follow behind the break.

Puzzles #401 & #402 - Unspoken Rules (TomTom)

One of the things I like to do with my puzzles sometimes is question a convention that most, or all puzzles in the genre have. Early on, I made a LITS with internal borders and thought nothing of it until people started discussing if it was a variant or not. Then early on this blog, there are the Moon or Sun puzzles that allow passing through all 0 of a symbol in a region. Now, here's a TomTom that uses negative given values, which is something I don't think I've seen before.

penpa interface      puzz.link (not recommended)

I tried making this between two other TomToms on request for GMP, actually- the first draft was broken (I missed that 3-3-2-1 = -3 as a possibility) because the idea crossed my mind. However, the other two were actually accepted for future use, and I'm really pleased with what I made for the one posted a couple weeks ago.

Puzzle 402 - "The Missing One"

Puzzle #388 - Lost in the Labyrinth (Statue Park)

I had another puzzle posted over on GMPuzzles today, this time a Statue Park. I really like this type and at the time hadn't really seen all white puzzles, while all black were reasonably common and I'd even done it myself. Fun fact about this puzzle: I originally made it for prototyping for something else entirely, but decided it wasn't a good fit there and that it was worth submitting to GMP.

Puzzle #379 - Plus One (Yajilin)

I may have forgotten to post my large Yajilin that was posted to GMP while I was going through the puzzles from Hexagony. This one was really fun to make, even though I ran into a lot of issues with resolving the 6x6 areas uniquely. The original version of the puzzle did not have symmetric clue placements, but once I had working logic I liked I moved most of the clues to equivalent locations and added a few useless ones to make everything fully symmetric.

Enjoy the puzzle!

Puzzle #378 - Twin Snakes (LITS)

One of my LITS puzzles was posted on GMP "today"! I like the break-in and theme on this one quite a lot, even if it falls very quickly once getting that break-in like many LITS puzzles do.

But yeah, like usual, no direct link or image since this puzzle is hosted offsite.

Puzzle #303 - Oh, Nine (Araf)

Yep, it's another puzzle of mine published over at GMPuzzles, this time an Araf. I'm extremely happy with this construction- it took some work to get the theme to function at all in a non-trivial way. The solve path is also surprisingly varied for the theme of only using the digit 9.

Check out the puzzle here.

Puzzle #276 - Chained (Cave)

This post is a bit different- no puzzle image, no interface link, just a link to where it's published on Grandmaster Puzzles. Most of my readers have probably already seen and solved this puzzle from a month ago. This blog is where I want to keep a record of all of my puzzles, and so it gets this post. Why now and not then? Simple, I had already planned for December 1st - 25th to be a variant series for numbers 251 - 275 and linking when it was first posted would have thrown off my numbering :P

GMP Submission #1 - Cave

I wasn't necessarily expecting this one to get accepted as the logic felt fairly plain to me with a fairly weak theme, but here we are. I tend to use diagonally touching clues in my Cave puzzles and this one was no exception- I have a few more puzzles waiting to be published in the future that I'm much more pleased with the construction of.

Which of course says a lot about them, because this one is solid!