A few years after the first Yajilin chains on Puzzlers Club (apparently about 4.5 years), the old spreadsheet was rediscovered. Somebody noted that the amount of givens would always be an even number, so... I made a starting point with an odd number, which also served as a way of unsticking the chain, as it must be constructed linearly.
Despite my prior post looking to the future, I think this is a good time to look into the past. These 3 puzzles are some of the oldest I've ever made. Do they still hold up to my current standards? I think so - my standards haven't really changed but my ability to reach or exceed those standards has.
First up, a Yajilin. The more things change, the more they stay the same - I think I'd have been okay with this in Yajilin Yacht honestly.
I was fortunate enough to be offered the opportunity to contribute to and testsolve for the 2022 Indian Puzzle Championship. The third round was for puzzle types that appeared in the LMI Daily Contest series, and I made a Kakuro and two Yajilin worth 50, 25 and 40 points, respectively.
As for these two Yajilin puzzles? Both ended up giving me a lot of trouble to end up working out the way I wanted them to. The IPC puzzle was aesthetically challenging to balance while the logic mostly did what I wanted (though I didn't want to include a 4, I liked what it did enough to keep it). The 2022 puzzle on the other hand was excruciating to get a puzzle that worked at all, even though the aesthetic balance was easy to get something nice for. I think this was the 3rd or 4th working puzzle I turned up and it was by far the best one. All of these are puzzles I'm really happy with and I'd gladly contribute to a contest like this again in the future.
This was the 16th and final Yajilin puzzle from my somewhat recent LMI contest, Yajilin Yacht. A solution video for the contest puzzle can be found on the contest page. Additionally, I've included the original version of the final puzzle (no link for it as it's the same puzzle with 3 clues removed) and an antisymmetric puzzle that took me 10 minutes to testsolve logically that I rejected completely from the contest for being too hard as a bonus puzzle.
This puzzle was the culmination of the entire contest up to this point. The break-in both relies on a single clue to confer any information, and also is definitively the most involved break-in of the contest. The rest of the solve utilizes so many techniques and has its own tricky steps throughout, keeping the feel of the puzzle fairly consistent even after that wall. Like Subdivision back at puzzle 12, it's a difficulty spike but unlike that puzzle, as the final boss of Yajilin Yacht that difficulty is earned. Only 156 people solved this beast during the contest, with 95 DNFs. I believe this is the highest DNF percentage in any daily contest and one of the lowest solve counts, behind only some early Tapa and Voxas puzzles from before the daily contests took off. And yet? The quality rating was one of the higher from Yajilin Yacht, while the closest comparison for DNF rate (the 1234 Voxas) has one of the lowest quality ratings from any daily contest. It's a brutal puzzle that solvers who persevered through it felt rewarded for their effort.
And really, that's all I wanted. For the contest as a whole I wanted to make some puzzles I was proud of, solvers to learn some things about Yajilin, and for people to feel like their time was well spent. I feel that I succeeded on all 3 of those goals.
This was the 15th Yajilin puzzle from my somewhat recent LMI contest, Yajilin Yacht. A solution video for the contest puzzle can be found on the contest page.
Though this puzzle was definitely inspired by a similar TGE puzzle, I still wanted to do something of my own with it and not just rely on parity steps. The one thing I'm not a huge fan of here is the presence of the 0 clue (come to think of it, I have a similar gripe with Subdivision) but the break-in is in my opinion the second coolest break-in of the contest. What's the coolest? Check the next post.
This was the 14th Yajilin puzzle from my somewhat recent LMI contest, Yajilin Yacht. A solution video for the contest puzzle can be found on the contest page. I'm getting so bored with typing up these descriptions why did I decide to do this on my blog and why did I let myself fall so far behind on posting ahhhhhh oh right you're not here to listen to me ramble you're here for a puzzle.
Surprisingly, I don't have a lot to say about this one. It's another Nikoli style puzzle but in my style, was somehow the highest rated puzzle of Yajilin Yacht, and I made it to very carefully rely on the presence of a single clue that without it, almost nothing is deducible. We'll come back to that later...
This was the 13th Yajilin puzzle from my somewhat recent LMI contest, Yajilin Yacht. A solution video for the contest puzzle can be found on the contest page.
Enter the Matrix was my other other other favorite puzzle from the contest, after One Up (2), Breezy Street (6) and Truly Symmetric (10). Though honestly, 15 and 16 are my other two favorites just from what I managed to pull off for them. Anyway!
A lot of people had to bash their way through this puzzle, but some people did end up deriving the key entrance counting idea in this layout for the first time during their solve. That was my entire goal for a puzzle like this - if you know the trick, it's a fairly straightforward solve. If you don't know the trick, there's not really a lot you can look at (other than the 4 down, which kind of helps anyway) to find it. And if you can't find it, the scale is still small enough to fiddle through. Overall, this was one of one of the most polarizing puzzles in the contest. People either got it and loved it, or didn't get it and didn't like it.
This was the 12th Yajilin puzzle from my somewhat recent LMI contest, Yajilin Yacht. A solution video for the contest puzzle can be found on the contest page. Additionally, the first puzzle I made for this spot, also themed around paired clues, can be found as a bonus puzzle below.
The original puzzle was somehow even harder - nicknamed "Lightbulb Moment", it could have worked in the contest. Though I was aware of the potential issues and ultimately decided that I wanted to try for a less difficulty spike puzzle for number 12. Too bad I failed at that goal later, but on the other hand, you get two puzzles to enjoy now.
This was the 11th Yajilin puzzle from my somewhat recent LMI contest, Yajilin Yacht. A solution video for the contest puzzle can be found on the contest page.
My goals here were to make a laterally symmetric puzzle (instead of the usual rotational symmetry) and to only use zeroes. The result was one of what I view as 2 difficulty mis-steps in Yajilin Yacht, as I should have gone bigger with this puzzle, or moved it earlier. I had expected it to be harder than it was to solve and also wanted to keep it far from Sloop and the result was a drastic difficulty drop two thirds of the way through the contest. Maybe I should have cut it and gone with something else instead to bridge the gap...
This was the 10th Yajilin puzzle from my somewhat recent LMI contest, Yajilin Yacht. A solution video for the contest puzzle can be found on the contest page.
This was my biggest construction flex for the contest. I'd wanted to make a Yajilin with symmetric clue placements for a long while but had never gotten around to it and this was the perfect excuse. This actually wasn't as hard to make as you might expect, mostly because I picked a good starting point and focused on clues that would resolve both of their respective corners at the same time.
This was the 9th Yajilin puzzle from my somewhat recent LMI contest, Yajilin Yacht. A solution video for the contest puzzle can be found on the contest page.
The obligatory clueless puzzle. There was a bit more on the left side than I normally would have liked, but the right side was neat enough in how it resolved that I kept the puzzle.
This was the 8th Yajilin puzzle from my somewhat recent LMI contest, Yajilin Yacht. A solution video for the contest puzzle can be found on the contest page. Additionally, I've included a second puzzle with the same theme that I made first but rejected from the contest for being too hard for the intended placement.
This puzzle was actually meant to be the 4th puzzle in the contest, as I expected Tilted Square to turn out a lot harder than it did, and this to turn out a lot easier than it did.
With that in mind, this bonus puzzle was also originally meant to slot in at the 4th puzzle in the contest - however I knew immediately that doing so would be a terrible idea and rejected the puzzle out of hand. I probably should have revisited these two after swapping 4 and 8 to see which one I liked more, since I really don't know. They both have their strengths.
This was the 7th Yajilin puzzle from my somewhat recent LMI contest, Yajilin Yacht. A solution video for the contest puzzle can be found on the contest page.
"All outside" clue Yajilin puzzles are fairly common. They usually end up being either fairly trivial or fairly bashy without much in-between, and though I don't think I made it too far into the in-between here I do think I made it a little bit. Having only 4 clues is pretty neat too.
This was the 6th Yajilin puzzle from my somewhat recent LMI contest, Yajilin Yacht. A solution video for the contest puzzle can be found on the contest page.
I wanted to show I could make just about any style of Yajilin in this contest, and so the first rectangular puzzle in any daily contest had to be a Nikoli-style puzzle. I also wanted to take it a step farther and have not only a nice solving flow but also clue symmetry, which ended up mostly working out. There's one step that's a bit harder, but nothing unreasonable.
