Puzzles #668, #669 & #670 - 24HPC Zodiac (Little Killer Latin Square, Antiknight Tomtom)

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).

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.

penpa interface

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.

penpa interface

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.

puzz.link interface      penpa interface

Puzzle #457 - Symbolic (Tomtom)

A while back I made a Tomtom puzzle with all given operations, since typically I give none. I like how it turned out honestly, three cell rows are really interesting.

penpa interface

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"

Puzzles #305 - #316 - Pentomino Puzzle Pack

Yes, you did in fact read that right- this post contains 12 puzzles. I had an idea for a pentomino themed set and yesterday, decided to see if I could get the entire pack together that day. I managed to construct all 12 puzzles and left the testing for today, fixed a few errors I had made, and here it is. I'm extremely proud of this set even without the fact that I put it together in a day.

Get the puzzle pack here!

This post won't have preview images or rules for each puzzle, but I will link them all here. The pack has a penpa link with answer check and rules written in alongside an image, so the pack can be solved physically or digitally without issue. The U puzzle has the variant of unequal lengths.

F  I  L  N  P  T  U  V  W  X  Y  Z

puzz.links for P, W and X can also be used. There was no way to make one for Z, unfortunately. Comments after the break.

Puzzle #142 - Untitled (Factors/TomTom)

So this is either a Factors puzzle where there's an unclued room or a TomTom puzzle where every cage is multiplication. It's also not the first time I've tried this theme, and funnily enough the only reason it worked is because of that large unclued room.

puzz.link interface