Mark Sweep's puzzles

This is an archival post of puzzles I once posted on Discord, but felt nice to have posted here as well. I created quite a few practice puzzles for the WPF Puzzle GP Round 7 in 2022 (instruction booklet and competition puzzles are found here ), as it contained quite a few puzzles or variants I was unfamiliar with. Most practice puzzles have a similar difficulty level to the point distribution of the contest puzzles. I was quite happy with the general quality of the puzzles, which I had to set within the time span of a few days. 1. Easy As ABC - 8 points Rules Place letters of the specified list into some cells, no more than one letter per cell, so that each letter appears exactly once in each row and column. The letters outside the grid indicate the first letter that can be seen in the respective row or column from the respective direction. Some letters may already be filled in for you. Some cells might be marked with a cross; do not put any letters into those cells. Solve on Penpa 2.

Creating puzzles for a contest (especially an entire UKPA round) comes with leftover puzzles. I did not feel like retaining these for other purposes, as they had already been tested by a few people. In case these puzzles feel familiar, they have also been posted at the website of the Dutch puzzle federation WCPN before. Hope you will enjoy these leftovers! Snake The Snake puzzle in the contest was already my least favorite of the set, but this puzzle was not better. For some reason I feel like my Snake setting creates either bashy puzzles or super trivial puzzles, definitely something I could improve on.  Rules Shade some cells to form a 1 cell wide snake of unknown length, whose head and tail are given. The snake does not touch itself, not even diagonally. Numbers outside the grid indicate the number of cells in that row/column that are occupied by the snake. Solve on Penpa Pentominous While I really liked this puzzle, it ended up being a bit too hard to include in the contest, as I w

This year I was invited to create a full round for the UKPA Open 2024 tournament.  For this competition I also tested most of the rounds, which contain many amazing puzzles! The instruction and puzzle booklets can all be found  here . Since I'm quite fond of making hybrids, I quickly had the idea of making some sort of puzzle circle with classic genres, and hybrids thereof. I knew I wanted a good mix of types of genres (number placement, shading, loop etc.), and after quite some thinking eventually came up with the rotation Snake, Pentominous, Castle Wall, Kurodoko, and Japanese Sums. Interestingly, I set over half of these puzzles on paper, something I barely used to do before.  At first I created 2 classic puzzles of each type and a total of 5 hybrids (so 15 puzzles in total), but after testing it quickly became clear that hybrids are often a lot more difficult to solve than you think. Hence, I decided to reduce it to only one classic of each genre.  In total the round was worth