On the Puzzler's Club Discord, Koala runs a parody quiz show called BuckBlosters, and wanted to run a logic puzzle round. So when a general call for constructors was put out, I volunteered and ended up making 10 of the 25 puzzles used! The target difficulty was "easy, for total beginners" and that ended up being overshot a bit, but it worked out well as both players had some solid logic puzzle experience. There was a puzzle for each letter except for X, and I ended up making A, C, H, J, M, N, P, Q, T and V.
First up: Arukone, with a theme of "oops". The show was pitched as "oops all logic" so I went with that as a starting point here. This one could probably have been a bit bigger but I like how the path turned out.
Curve Data was the obvious choice for a trolling C genre, and so I elected to make a simple example of what can best be described as a Cursed Data.
I had a Heteromino lying around that I didn't submit to the 6x6 logic showcase, so I dropped it into this project since I liked the open space it had. This is a pretty tough type to construct actually.
There weren't a lot of options for puzzle types beginning with a J, and after a couple non-unique Juosan puzzles were posted, I tried my hand at it. I uh... came up short on the first couple attempts before finally managing a unique one. It's a very strange type!
I thought that the set should be all very easy puzzles, and so I took the letter M to make a more challenging Minesweeper, operating under the assumption that everybody already knows these rules and so something more challenging can just be dropped in. It worked out well, the puzzle didn't take too long to get solved and honestly took a similar amount of time to the rest of the ones that weren't trivial. This was also the first time I'd tried constructing one of these- specifying the corners proved to be an issue, in the same way that I ran into issues getting the last bits of the Arukone and Juosan to work as this was also the first time I'd tried making those types.
NIKOJI allows for some very fun theming, while being very tough to construct. And again, this was the first time I tried...I think it turned out well enough. Especially because I did manage to get this theme to work.
Next up, I made a more involved Putteria puzzle because the type is simple enough that I though the main logical idea in this puzzle would be easy enough to spot. It had one of the longest solve times of the show (of puzzles that came up) while still not being excessive, which I count as an absolute win.
There were jokes about how there were no Q puzzle types but we needed a Q anyway, and the leading thought process was to go with "Qurve Data". I didn't like that idea so I made a Qre. I mean I made an Aqre. Yeah, that's the one. Just like Putteria and most of the rest this was the first time I'd tried making one, so I'm very happy I managed to get the OH NO theme to work.
I hadn't really tried to make a solution themed Spiral Galaxies before, so I gave it a shot. The solvers got a kick out of it afterwards so again, a successful construction. Making a good puzzle is all about making sure it fits well into where it gets shared, whether that be a blog (either everything or a standalone good puzzle), something just for fun (probably easier) or a contest (hide the uniqueness tricks, probably not trivial). Also this was labeled Tentaisho to allow for a Sudoko game. You don't know what a Sudoko game is? Well, you see, it takes 10 to 30 minutes...
And for my final contribution, I made a View puzzle to knock out the letter V as I knew that would be a challenging letter to hit. View is still a weird type to work with and so I'm surprised I managed a theme like this one at all. Though, only 0 would work best on a small grid anyway...
Enjoy the puzzles! I'm not sure if #350 will be anything special or not, but I do know that I should have another post before then with something else I've been working on that I'm excited to share. Keep an eye out for it!
