#24 - WSPC 2023 Recap & Puzzles
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 month leading up to the championship, I did practice puzzles again to get back into it. Since puzzles have my strong preference, I did not prepare for sudoku at all.
WSC 2023
At the WSC I managed to place 96th of a total of 180 participants, so quite close to my goal of top half of the field. It is quite clear that I did not practice sudoku much before the tournament, as I really needed to warm up to it before having some decent rounds. Since I'm more involved with puzzles, I won't give a detailed breakdown of each round. However, what I found interesting is that the round I was most scared of (Round 9: Grid-breaking) ended up being one of my best rounds, even though I'm usually quite terrible at irregular sudoku.
Round 1: 75/450 points (153th)
Round 2: 120/450 points (140th)
Round 3: 270/600 points (63th)
Round 4: 140/600 points (107th)
Round 5: 240/550 points (63th)
Round 6: 230/450 points (78th)
Round 7: 140/550 points (118th)
Round 8: 225/550 points (50th)
Round 9: 250/550 points (58th)
Round 10: 180/575 points (85th)
WPC 2023
At the WPC I really outperformed my expectations. Out of a total of 175 participants I managed to secure 32nd place! I was also in a close contest with Yuan Yao for the 3rd place in the 'first time' category, but he simply ended up outperforming me in the last few rounds.
Compared to other people, I did not miss out on too many free points, e.g. by forgetting to fill one cell of the grid. Most of my lost points are due to bad time management or my brain simply not working. This can hopefully be improved with more competition practice and some genre-specific practice. Anyway, I had never expected to be able to finish 3 rounds in total. It is quite obvious from my round finishes that I am relatively good at new logic/newer genres. I knew this already beforehand, but it is interesting to see it so clearly here at the world championship. Overall, I am really happy with my performance and would love to join more WPCs in the future for sure!
Round 1 - Welcome to Canada: 530/600 (26th)
As I had no clue where my level would be at, I was very content to see that I finished almost all puzzles in the first round already. This also gave me some hope that there might be potential to finish a round when the puzzle genres are very much up my alley.
Round 2 - Jacob E. Funk: 285/450 (43th)
Number placement is probably my weakest puzzle type. Here I also broke one of the puzzles badly which cost quite some time, but even with more time I would not have been able to do the 140 point Konkat-Kuro anyway. So, all in all a decent round.
Round 3 - Niagara Falls: 360/500 (13th)
I absolutely love new puzzle concepts or mash-ups of genres, so I was really looking forward to this round. Since I have solved many weird/different puzzle concepts on the puzzle portal of Logic Masters Deutschland, I assumed I would also be quite decent at this round. It went quite well, although I could have had a bit more if I had been more efficient sometimes. Anyway, at the time I was a bit disappointed that I did not get done more, but in hindsight 13th of all contestants (considering this was still my first day ever at a WPC) is quite good.
Round 4 - Road to GMPuzzles: 155/400 (120th)
In advance I was already scared of this round. Practice puzzles of MathPath never felt like they came easy to me (at least not to solve competitively with time pressure). I also tried creating one practice puzzle, but that (of course) ended up being non-unique... The round went absolutely atrocious. The puzzles were actually nice with good telegraphing of where to go, but I just managed to break everything I could break. In two puzzles (50 and 65-pointer) I just could not see the options I was missing to make it work. Anyway, perhaps good that it happened here, as I would have disliked it way more if I messed up a round that suits me well.
Round 5 - American Stars: 200/350 (36th)
This round I massively enjoyed. I was really smiling at several amazing deductions in the puzzles. It was just very unfortunate that I was a few stars away from finishing the 110-pointer...
Round 6 - North American Siblings: 60/360 (69th)
A round concept that I was really looking forward to. Linked puzzles I always enjoy solving. Unfortunately this round was a bit all or nothing it felt like, but that's ofcourse for everyone. If I had five more minutes, I probably would have finished nearly all puzzles. A rookie mistake I did make here was that I did not guess between a few options for two nearly finished grids.
Round 7 - A Galaxy Far, Far Away: 425/500 (18th)
Another very solid performance here. Applying Myopia rules to different genres made for quite a nice round. I have to admit that the 90-point Battleships I did use some (educated) guessing to solve it (while I usually stick to logic), but that can also be useful to do sometimes.
Round 10 - Words Can Define Us: 250/500 (34th)
As the last round of the tournament, and word puzzles not being my particular strongsuit, this was quite decent. It was quite unforunate that I broke the 100-point Crisscross, which I only noticed towards the end of the solve, as that could have made it quite a good finish of the tournament. Also managed to make a mistake on the 10-point Wordle bank, which I thought was quite hilarious. Let's just say I did it on purpose to get a perfect 6000 as total score...
Round 11 - What is the Meaning of Aqre?: 420/400 (16th)
Heading towards this round I already felt like this might be a potential finisher for me. Aqre was invented by Eric Fox in a period I was really active on Discord, so I have been familiarized with this genre since its beginning (and I also quite like it). On excursion day, I also gave some people tips about strategies on how to think about Aqre, of which I was glad to hear afterwards that it helped them! During the round some high pointers went quite smoothly, so about halfway through I realized I was indeed on schedule to finish this round. It was such a good feeling to be able to shout "finished" for the first time, with 2 minutes left on the timer.
Round 12 - Stretching Our Legs: 505/750 (27th)
These big grids were very fun to solve. I really like the flow of larger puzzles, when you get familiar with the logic. I did forget to place one digit in the Nanro (Signpost) that is to be placed at the very beginning of the solve, which did cost me 80 points.
Round 13 - Islands of Insight: 700/700 (14th)
I was really curious about this round. It seemed like a lot of fun and usually I'm relatively good at figuring out the meaning of a new combination of rulesets quickly. However, I had also seen crazy practice puzzles, so I was curious in which direction it was going to go. Eventually I really enjoyed all the puzzles in this round! Managed to finish them all just after the timer hit 1 minute left, so I decided to spend this last minute to carefully check all my solutions. I should thank Bram de Laat for this finish, as his practice puzzles (which were shared with the Dutch team) definitely helped for a couple of the puzzles.
Round 14 - Melon's Puzzles: 275/400 (33rd)
This was a decent round. The Antisymmetry variant (145-pointer) went quite smoothly, because I had gotten familiar with quite some concepts by setting a practice puzzle for it. I did not manage my time well though. In the end I did not have enough time to finish the 105-point Castle Wall, so I should have started that earlier in the round instead.
Round 15 - All over the Map: 315/650 (76th)
This was supposed to be quite a good round. I was in quite a good flow actually, if it was not for the fact that the triangular grid of the Masyu messed me up in such a way that I missed one option for one of the black dots late in the solve. I think I (partially) restarted this puzzle about three times, and still did not manage to solve this puzzle (worth 155 points) in the end... Also, I made a small error on the Rail Pool, which means I did not get those 115 points either. So, I effectively scored only half of the points that I should have scored here.
Round 16 - The Breadth of America: 690/650 (8th)
This round was a bit of a surprise to me. I was familiar with Disorderly Loop from my active Discord times, but for the other genres I only solved one or two practice puzzles. Especially Exercise scared me quite a bit. However, all of a sudden I only had the 140-point Exercise left to solve with 12-15 minutes left, if I remember correctly. Perhaps the adrenaline rush of feeling like I could finish another round helped me, as this tough puzzle went rather smoothly, meaning I could hand in my booklet with 4 minutes to spare.
Round 18 - Roger's Bag: 215/400 (52nd)
This round did not go as well as I had hoped. It had nothing to do with errors, but just the fact that I wasn't as good at hard cave puzzles as I thought I would be. Some months after the WPC I got the Colossal Cave Collection by Roger Barkan, which is a great book with high quality cave puzzles, and that definitely would have helped for this round in hindsight. I think the schedule change (with all the individual rounds being pushed into two days) also started to hit me here, as I wasn't used to solving competitively for so long in succession.
Round 19 - Holesome Diet: 210/440 (54th)
Another new concept type of round which I was really looking forward to. The exhaustion at this point probably did not help, but I was really going about it in the wrong way. Rather than solving it from the bottom to the top I sort of tried to identify middle layers first, which is of course rather illogical. Anyway, that still leaves me with some fun puzzles to finish back home.
Round 20 - Pentominous+: 405/600 (43rd)
In this round I really noticed that my solving brain was tired. I sometimes stared at puzzles for way too long before noticing something quite obvious. It was a fun round though, and I did solve what I really wanted to solve.
Practice puzzle
As the instruction booklet was published less than a week prior to the start of the WSC and I was already flying to Toronto a few days in advance, I did not have too much time to create practice puzzles. I tried to make a Math Path, which unfortunately ended up being non-unique without there being an easy fix to it.
So the only successful practice puzzle I made was a Castle Wall (Antisymmetry). After playing around with the ruleset a bit I noticed some interesting types of deductions, which I tried to really showcase in this puzzle.
Rules
Standard Castle Wall Rules apply. However, none of the clue colors are given. For each symmetric pair (180 degree rotational) of clue cells, one cell is white and the other cell is black.
Speed setting competition
During one of the evenings of the championship, a speed setting competition was hosted, which was judged by Chiel (on-site) and Prasanna (remotely). The assignment was to add another genre to Yajilin and make a working puzzle out of it, in the timespan of one hour. I had to think for a bit what could be nice, and ended up with a funky Tapa-Like Loop / Yajilin mash-up. In making it unique I did have to sacrifice some logic, but it wasn't an easy puzzle to solve anyway, and I was really happy how it all worked out within the given time. The puzzle finished in 3rd place out of 19 total entries, winning me a nice puzzle book! I was definitely impressed by Chiels dedication to solve all of the puzzles after long days of competitive solving, but it was really fun to participate!
Rules
Shade some cells so that no two shaded cells are orthogonally adjacent and draw a non-intersecting loop through the centers of all the remaining empty cells. Clues cannot be shaded.
Each digit in a clue cell is either a Tapa-Like Loop clue, or a Total Yajilin clue. A Tapa-Like Loop clue represents the numbers of consecutive cells occupied by the loop each time it enters the (up to) eight cells surrounding the clue. A Total Yajilin clue indicates the sum of shaded cells visible in all four horizontal and vertical directions combined.
Where the same digits appear in a clue cell more than once, at most one of the digits in a clue cell is a Total Yajilin clue. Also, clue cells are not required to have a Total Yajilin clue; some of them may contain Tapa-like-loop clues only.
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