Puzzle #431 - Breezy Street (Yajilin)

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.

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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.

Puzzles #429 & #430 - Sloop (Yajilin)

This was the fifth 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 made a bonus puzzle with the same layout but different clues.

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I had to make an all 0 puzzle. I had to. Since I knew I wanted this to be early in the overall contest, and with steadily increasing square sizes, 11x11 would be a perfect place to put this puzzle without tipping people off in advance. Something like 11x10 would have been a dead giveaway that something fishy was going on. This puzzle didn't go over the best - some people felt cheated out of a Yajilin, others questioned the point, but ultimately this was my contest and I was going to do what I wanted to do with it. And besides, a good amount of people got a kick out of it :)

As for the bonus? I spent a while messing around with clue values until I found one that worked fairly. More for my own constructing amusement than anything else. More puzzles never hurt though, right?

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Puzzle #428 - Tilted Square (Yajilin)

This was the fourth Yajilin puzzle from my somewhat recent LMI contest, Yajilin Yacht. A solution video for the contest puzzle can be found on the contest page.

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Originally this puzzle did use the full tilted square, with 4 additional clues. I really didn't like what that did to the corners though, so I removed them and started fresh with the 3 clue. I saw a really cool continuation from there that I had to use, and finishing the puzzle from there proved easy enough.

Puzzle #427 - Y is for... (Yajilin)

This was the third Yajilin puzzle from my somewhat recent LMI contest, Yajilin Yacht. A solution video for the contest puzzle can be found on the contest page.

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A six clue layout like this for a 9x9 was fairly ambitious, but something I felt would be possible to make smoothly. Ultimately, I was right, with another key idea being critical to unraveling the left side. It turned out a lot of people trialed or guessed through it, though, without getting the idea...

Puzzles #422 - 426 - One Up (Yajilin)

This was the second 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 four prior versions of this puzzle because the evolution of One Up was interesting, to see how I got to the final puzzle.

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This is honestly one of my favorite puzzles from the contest. It takes a simple theme that's difficult to execute well and manages to avoid the most common traps, which my earlier iterations ran headfirst into.

version 1          version 2          version 3          version 4

Version 1 met most of my goals as a construction - one clue per column, at least one shaded cell behind a clue - but the regularity of the solution as well as most shaded cells being directly in front of their clues was unsatisfying. So I kept going.

Version 2 I liked slightly more, but the presence of a clue in row 2 really irked me, along with the left side instantly fully resolving. So I kept going.

Version 3, on a re-solve, is actually a pretty good puzzle. It still has a few properties I didn't love in the trivial left and the shaded positions, but I was finally getting somewhere. But could I do better by giving up one one clue per column?

Version 4 hit on a very good start to the puzzle that I ended up preserving for the final version. However, having it in columns 3-6 made resolving the rest difficult to do nicely. I likely would have gone with this version if I hadn't continued trying with the setup moved to columns 2-5 instead, which ended up working much much nicer.

Many of the other puzzles in Yajilin Yacht went through a similar process of exploration, however most of the other puzzles didn't produce completed, working puzzles along the way. Just alternate implementations of similar ideas, or things I backtracked to try a different approach.

Puzzle #421 - Countdown (Yajilin)

This was the first Yajilin puzzle from my somewhat recent LMI contest, Yajilin Yacht. A solution video for the contest puzzle can be found on the contest page.

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I knew from the beginning that I wanted the first puzzle to be easier than the last trials, and spent a few minutes toying with "countdown" layouts before hitting on this puzzle. Two of the meaningful clues resolve trivially, and the last adds an extra wrinkle that showcases an important Yajilin pattern. It might be easy (with the fastest solve being a mere 9 seconds) but it served its purpose well.

Puzzles #414 - 420 - Yajilin Yacht Trials

I'm a bit delayed on posting my Yajilin Yacht puzzles here, including some bonuses and rejects from the series. I have a lot more to say about each of the contest puzzles (and some of the bonuses are tied directly to alternate versions of those) and not much to say about the trials, so here's 5 fairly easy Yajilin puzzles and 2 that have a bit more bite. For any puzzle in the contest, a solution walkthrough is available linked from the contest page. For the bonus puzzles, you're on your own - though if requested, I can record a solution video there too.

The rest of the contest puzzles (and their bonuses) will be going up one an hour, every hour from when this post goes live.

Trial 1: My only goal here was to have no difficult steps necessary, along with the standard design considerations. Unclued but forced shaded cells were a bonus.

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Trial 2: I wanted to show the interaction between overlapping clues for this puzzle. Fun fact: the puzzle is unique with only the two values in column 4.

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Trial 3: This was a late addition to the trials, because the puzzle I originally made for unclued walls I decided I didn't like. This puzzle also doubles as a puzzle were certain parity steps are extremely helpful.

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Trial 4: Zero clues give a lot of simple loop logic, and I felt that by including it here, it could be fair to include later. Ultimately I tried to have this series continue building on itself, where crucial steps in past puzzles could be used again as assumed knowledge. Did it work the way I anticipated? Sort of!

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Trial 5: Now this is a puzzle that set the tone for the contest proper: no clear starting point but a clever argument exists to break in. I'm very happy with how this one turned out. The corners proved quite difficult to get to work with this layout, too.

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The Rejects: The first reject was because I didn't think it was a particularly interesting puzzle and I could do the "shaded cell in one of two" thing better. The second? I thought the puzzle was boring and didn't really showcase anything new. Neither are bad puzzles, they just weren't what I was going for.

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Puzzle #413 - Celebratory Trophy (Nurimisaki)

Nurimisaki Nomad, the latest daily contest series on LMI just concluded. After a hard-fought battle with a couple stumbles on my part (but 7 first places!) I managed to scrape a 4 point win over Walker Anderson in what I believe is the closest final score for one of these to date. The puzzles are all excellent and I highly recommend checking them out if you haven't already! This is my 2nd win, and to celebrate, I made a Nurimisaki in the shape of a trophy.

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I know I've been promising more posts for a while and I have a hefty backlog to post so hopefully I find the time to actually put together the posts soon.

Puzzle #412 - Yajilin Yacht is Here!

Logic Masters India has been running "daily" contest series for a number of months now, and the next one in the series is Yajilin Yacht by me! Tons of details and rules over on the site, but the short version is the contest formally starts in a exactly 2 days from this post. But you can try out some trial puzzles to feel out the format and interface right now!

I'm extremely happy with the set of puzzles I put together for the contest, and to help promote it here's a Yajilin I made some time after finalizing the set. This one is kind of tricky and uses a rare pattern I've only seen a few times.

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Enjoy the puzzle, and enjoy the contest!

I'll be back once that's done with many, many puzzles as I have a bit of a backlog ready to go, I've just been really busy and have delayed posting to juggle a couple projects first. Including Yajilin Yacht of course.

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.