Mark Sweep's puzzles

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

Better late than never I wanted to recap the World Sudoku and Puzzle Championship 2023 in Toronto, Canada. In addition, I also have a couple of puzzles to share that were made by me for or during this competition. These can be found at the bottom of this post. This was my first time participating at the world championships, being part of the Dutch B-team for Sudoku and the Dutch A-team for Puzzles. As a first timer at the world stage of puzzling, I enjoyed my time immensely! I really enjoyed getting to know new people and putting faces to online usernames, as well as some nice evening activites that were organized. Ofcourse I also had lots of fun with all the great quality puzzles. Since it was my first time, team rounds were new to me, and I liked them a lot. Solving together as a team is definitely an interesting and exciting experience. In the months prior to the championship, I had not been solving many puzzles at all, since I was focused on some other things. Nevertheless, in the