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Showing posts from January, 2024

#23 - UKPC 2023 puzzles

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Last year I had the pleasure to create some puzzles for the UK Puzzle Championship. Basically I was asked to create some well-known types, some more unfamiliar ones and perhaps a few variants. The UKPC was divided into two rounds of 90 minutes each, with 540 points up for grabs in each round (so 6 points per minute). Round 1 can be found here and round 2 can be found here .  Below you can find the puzzles I created.   1.1 Mastermind (10 points) I always like a small word puzzle in contests. That's why I created this one with mostly (stereo)typical words associated with the UK. Rules Identify a secret code comprised of letters (digits in the example). Each row represents a guess at the secret code, with black dots identifying letters that are in the correct position and white dots letters that are in the guess but in a different position to the code. The dots are given in no specific order, and each letter in the secret code contributes at most one dot, with black dots given priori