#14 - Themed Trio

These puzzles were made for a speed setting contest on the CTC Discord server. The assignment was quite simple: create 3 puzzles from 3 out of 5 listed genres, in a time period of 75 minutes. To challenge myself, I tried to share elements between the puzzles (the givens and the regions). Due to time pressure near the end I had to use an online solver to make sure the Nurikabe would be unique with the same numbers as the Double Choco, which actually caused the Nurikabe to be very hard to solve logically. Hence, I spent some time since then to find a more enjoyable Nurikabe, although this did make the Double Choco somewhat harder. Anyway, I have shared the old versions below as well if you're interested. Enjoy!

Rules

LITS

Shade one tetromino of cells in each region so that all shaded cells form one orthogonally connected area. Two tetrominoes of the same shape may not share a bold border, counting rotations and reflections as the same. No 2x2 region may be entirely shaded.


Double Choco

Divide the grid into regions of orthogonally connected cells, each containing a connected group of white cells and a connected group of grey cells, with the property that the shape of the white cells is identical to the shape of the grey cells, allowing rotations and reflections. Clued cells must belong to a region containing the indicated number of white cells and the indicated number of grey cells.


Nurikabe

Shade some cells so that all shaded cells form one orthogonally connected area. Clues cannot be shaded, and every orthogonally connected area of unshaded cells contains exactly one clue, the value of which represents the size of the area. No 2x2 region may be entirely shaded.







Online solving links
LITS
Double Choco
Nurikabe
Double Choco (original version)
Nurikabe (original version)

















Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

#26 - UKPA 2024 Leftovers

Image
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...
Read more

#22 - Nurimisaki Nomad Leftovers

Image
Recently I had the pleasure of creating the daily contest  Nurimisaki Nomad  on Logic Masters India, which you can actually still solve casually when it's finished. Many puzzles that I wrote did not make it into the contest, mostly because I got too familiar with Nurimisaki after solving almost the entire puzzlink database, meaning many puzzles were based on patterns that are not trivial at all to newer solvers of the genre. Thanks a lot to test solvers Botaku and PixelPlucker for making me realize that in time, such that I could add some more puzzles that are relatively beginner friendly to the actual contest. Anyway, there are still two leftover puzzles that I'd like to show, an All 4s puzzle that I replaced by another one in the contest because of difficulty, and a Shuriken themed puzzle. The latter one I was actually very happy with, it's just that it can be a very frustrating puzzle if you don't know where to look. Enjoy these puzzles! Rules Shade some cells so th...
Read more

#25 - UKPA 2024 Puzzles

Image
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 r...
Read more