Mark Sweep's puzzles

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...

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...

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 ...