Mark Sweep's puzzles

Last year I had the pleasure to write a round for the 24 hours puzzle championship (24HPC) taking place after the WSPC in Eger, Hungary. I did this together with Chiel Beenhakker (bakpao) and Bram de Laat (Para), who are also both from the Netherlands.  Our round consisted of a total of 30 puzzles: 15 standard types and 15 variations where a certain element (clues, cells, or objects) was enlarged. While there was no extremely difficult puzzle in the set, nobody managed to finish it (which is the goal for a 24HPC set), just because of the sheer volume of puzzles. Chiel's and Bram's puzzles (round 2), as well as all other  rounds from the 24HPC can be found in the archive of chaotic_iak here , definitely worth checking out! I definitely owe a lot of thanks to Bram and Chiel for this round. Due to a major deadline (handing in my PhD thesis) I did not have much time. They took quite some load off my hands by contributing more puzzles (12 each) and Chiel formatted everything by him...

If you're here just for the practice puzzles, scroll all the way down to the bottom of this post. This post is also quite late after the WSPC, but I just did not have the time and motivation to finish up this post earlier. This was my third time participating at the world championships, being part of the Dutch B-team for Sudoku and the Dutch A-team for Puzzles. In general, I immensely enjoyed this event. It was very well organized, went smoothly, and most puzzles were of very high quality! So huge credits to the organization and author teams for making this happen.  WSC 2025 Individual ranking: 82nd/252 Team ranking: 17th/63  It was a nice surprise to me that I placed top 100 in Sudoku, considering I had not solved many prior to this championship (as all my practice goes into WPC). I did love the variation between rounds, with several rounds feeling quite different from regular Sudoku. For me that's perfect, as the weirder or more puzzle-like it gets, the better I tend to be a...

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. ...