Puzzles #665, #666 & #667 - 24HPC Zodiac (NIKOJI, Nurimisaki, Balance Loop)

I also contributed several puzzles to the Puzzlers Club rounds at the 2024 24 Hour Puzzle Championship this year. We authored two rounds, each with 24 puzzles. The first round had one puzzle themed on each Greek letter, while the second round was a double zodiac (signs and animals).

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.

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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.

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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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Puzzle #300 - Colorblind Loop

For my 300th puzzle (wow I made it to 300 yay!) on this blog, I'm sharing the second half of my secret solver gift for wen, called Colorblind Loop. It's inspired by Bram de Laat's Four Color Loop, where instead of using 4 loop genres with numbered rooms, I decided to go with 4 loop genres that use black and white symbols. The rules are a little lengthy but shouldn't be too hard to understand as it's mostly just 4 standard genres mashed together.

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Colorblind Loop: Draw a single non-intersecting loop orthogonally connecting cell centers. Each region obeys one of four constraints, to be determined during solving. Adjacent regions may not require the same constraint. (note that this means a region may satisfy multiple constraints, but only one will be required)

Constraint 1: Black and white circles obey Masyu rules.

Constraint 2: Black and white circles obey Balance Loop rules.

Constraint 3: This region obeys Moon or Sun rules. The region may only be visited once. During this visit, all circles of one color will be touched and all circles of the other color must not be used. Travelling around the full final loop, the color of the circle used in all regions with this constraint must alternate. (no such restriction applies to non-Moon or Sun regions)

Constraint 4: This region obeys Kuroshiro Loop rules. All cells in the region must be used. Any loop segment that enters this region must not turn between circles of the same color, and must turn exactly once between circles of different colors. (this includes visits to the region that do not touch any circles!) The loop may turn or travel straight freely on a circle.

I really like some of the things I managed to fit into this grid, both aesthetically and logically. Total construction and testing time on this was probably about 10 hours, which is a bit less than last year- though some of that was due to making errors last year, while this construction process was surprisingly error free!

Puzzles #296 - #299 - Not-So-Secret Solver (Masyu, Balance Loop, Moon or Sun, Kuroshiro Loop)

I participated in the Puzzlers Club Secret Solver event again this year, and this time was assigned wen (who I've seen have an account name of wen1now somewhere, though I can't remember where), someone who has made some pretty insane puzzles. I decided to break out an idea I'd had lying around for a while and successfully constructed it- but more on that tomorrow.

I had about a week left until the deadline and thought it'd be funny to send some vanilla puzzles first, framed like they were the entire gift. The "real" puzzle would then be an extra surprise after solving the rest. I'm not sure entirely how it went over, so I hope it was amusing and that the initial set of 4 wasn't disappointing! The link I originally sent can be found here and the rules for each of Masyu, Balance Loop, Moon or Sun and Kuroshiro Loop can be found on their links.

Happy solving!

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The Masyu didn't end up very challenging, as early on I decided to focus more on a fairly restricted aesthetic theme.

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Like with the Masyu, the Balance Loop aesthetic ended up driving much of the solve. Most of my effort went into resolving the right side uniquely! This is probably my favorite of these 4.

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This Moon or Sun was a fun challenge to construct- limiting placements in this genre takes some creative region stretching to make it work nicely.

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Kuroshiro Loop can take on a life of its own when constructing, especially when targeting an arrangement of givens that looks like something. I ran into a few situations where I needed a circle to be both colors simultaneously, but eventually found a nice way to change the N that resulted in a unique puzzle with a nice solve path.

Puzzle #269 - Constellation (Balanced Moon or Sun)

I've seen Moon or Sun puzzles where the clues must obey Masyu rules before, and thought I'd try for something a bit more original by having the clues obey Balance Loop rules. White circles (suns) will have the loop segments travel the same distance in both directions, and the black crescents (moons) will have the loop segments travel a different distance in both directions. There's some potential for very sparse and tricky puzzles with this combo, though I doubt it'll be seen anytime soon since neither genre is particularly common.

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Puzzle #184 - Odd Idea (Balance Loop)

Since I've used a lot of even numbers in my Balance Loop puzzles, I thought I'd try making one themed around odd numbers. I ended up with a bit of a light bulb shape and found some interesting deductions along the way.

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Puzzle #183 - Star Under Siege (Balance Loop)

I still think that my Balance Loop puzzles tend to be more heavily clued than those by other people, and also tend to rely on even numbers more. It's always interesting to me to see where my style ends up going towards when constructing various types, and doubly so that it usually only takes 3 or 4 puzzles to find it.

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Puzzle #182 - Blemished (Balance Loop)

The pains of fixing ambiguities in Balance Loop puzzles- the patch is fairly obvious, I think. Still, I like the resultant logic and the remainder of the puzzle enough to not mind the slightly broken symmetry.

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Puzzle #181 - Shades of Gray (Balance Loop)

I have to say, the fact that Balance Loop circles give no information on whether the loop turns on that cell can make uniqueness pretty difficult to force, sometimes. I had to add an extra pair of circles from my original aesthetic to get things to work out here, but it still looks nice enough and solves well.

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Puzzle #180 - What Do We Appreciate? (Balance Loop)

Balance Loop is a genre that took me a while to start understanding, and honestly it only started clicking when I started constructing this puzzle. The rules are stronger than they first appear, as the type has less "basic" deductions than most other types, but it still has a depth of tools available.

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I know, a puzzle that isn't a variant, shocking! 😀