Round 3 was themed on taking sudoku variants and applying them to non-sudoku puzzles. I put myself down for number placement, wanting to make a puzzle of a type that has arithmetic normally combined with killer cages. I thought about a few types before settling on Doppelblock. I also signed up for clone Snake since I knew the combination had potential from old, old Islands of Insight rule prototyping. In fact, now that that game isn't getting new content, I know a lot of these old unused puzzles will stay unused, so retain all the rights to them. I've gone through my archive and have about 80 puzzles in this category I think are good enough to share, so at some point I'll have to set up solving interfaces/write rules/share them.
Anyway, Killer Doppelblock! Standard Doppelblock rules apply. Additionally, all the numbers inside a cage add up to the number in the corner of the cage. This is a pretty cool combination, where the different ways of getting partial sums interact in some really cool ways. This was worth 65 points.
Clone Snake: Standard Snake rules apply, with given endpoints and an unknown length. Two cages of the same shape and orientation must have the same arrangement of snake and not snake cells. The first puzzle here is actually one of those old IOI prototype puzzles, since I added it to the organization sheet after a couple failed constructions, to at least have a puzzle in the slot. I put a note that this was from a couple years ago and I didn't think anyone at the IPC would have seen it before. A few hours later, I finally turned up a satisfactory second puzzle, and added that to the sheet to provide an option for which puzzle to use. Prasanna chose both, worth 30 and 50 points.
