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Trial 3: This was a late addition to the trials, because the puzzle I originally made for unclued walls I decided I didn't like.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.

Puzzle #410 - Cave (Half and Half)

Recently, djmathman finished running Logic Showcase 31, where the requirement was to make a puzzle using the recently popularish variant "Half and Half". In addition to standard Cave rules, exactly half of the cells in each outlined area must be shaded. I almost didn't submit a puzzle for this but found myself with an hour before the deadline, an idea, and a drive to make something neat.

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I did at one point have a unique puzzle without the dominoes in the corners but felt that the extra pair of regions allowed for an improvement to the logic and flow of the puzzle.

Puzzle #409 - Mirror, Mirror (Aqre)

It took me a while to actually sit down to make a serious Aqre puzzle (since rooms still don't feel right for me with the other constraints) so of course, when I did I went for a very ambitious theme of symmetric rooms, with a 5 on one side and a 2 on the other. It took surprisingly little time to find a working puzzle, but it took significantly longer to find a version that I felt had fair enough logic. It's still really subtle and I'll probably put together a walkthrough for this one to explain the intention at some point later.

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Also, Puzzle Ramayan round 1 recently concluded, and I recorded my third place finish, and added a few annotations throughout. If you're interested, feel free to check it out here.

Puzzle #408 - Suspicious Clearout (Uso-One)

All the way back on August 31st, 2021, Bryce Herdt posted a 4 room Uso-One template. The theme is... obvious. I'd never tried making one before, so I gave it a shot and then sat on the puzzle until then, unsure if I was going to do anything with it or not. After all, it wasn't my theme and the solve is a bit simple. But simple isn't bad and this was the only non-meme puzzle that was made from the layout so, here it is.

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What a weird type. I really need to get better at dealing with lying clues. This also concludes my backlog of puzzles that I can actually post for now- I have so many good ones waiting to be freed up :)

Puzzle #407 - Bonus Gift (NIKOJI)

MetaTerminal didn't receive a secret solver gift this year. So a bunch of people banded together to assemble a series of mostly hunt puzzles- since that's where things were headed and I don't do hunt puzzles, I didn't help out.

But then when they started streaming a solve of their gift, I felt like putting together an extra puzzle just because, and went with a NIKOJI due to available theming- this is still a weird type to construct and I ran into a lot of dead ends. Though in the end, I made something I think is pretty neat.

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The extra E and the mis-spelling are unfortunate. But hey, this works.

Puzzle #406 - Quartered, To Be Drawn (Simple Loop)

I felt like making a Simple Loop one day. I made this, and no longer felt like making Simple Loop any time in the near future- it's so hard to make a puzzle work without circumventing earlier deductions that I honestly just gave up.

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Small compromise aside, I do like how parts of this turned out. I just think I'd need to go much, much bigger to really get anything meaty.