Mark Sweep's puzzles

For this year's UKPA open I teamed up with Lennart Muijres (Leonardo024) to create a puzzle set. I already had the idea to have an entire set using stained glass clues, basically due to a Stained Glass Yin Yang I really liked during 24HPC.  So we got together to figure out genres where this would be feasible, taking into account the final combo puzzle. For the combo puzzle we started setting together, after which we focused more on individual subgrids by ourselves.  We initially only had one puzzle per type and the final combo puzzle. However, we ended up making some extra easier puzzles so that there would be more things to solve in all difficulty ranges. Our full round (round 4) and all the other rounds from UKPA open 2026 can be found here . Below are just the puzzles I created along with some thoughts. Our entire round lasted 75 minutes and had a total worth of 455 points. Stitches (Stained Glass) I liked this combination more than I anticipated. I have also grown more fon...

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...

Currently catching up with posting some puzzles on this blog. Like in 2023, in 2024 I helped to create puzzles for the UK puzzle championship (UKPC). The championship 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. 1.2 Suguru (15 points) Rules Place a number into each cell so that each region contains the numbers from 1 to N with no repeats, where N is the number of cells in the region. Numbers of the same value may not touch one another, not even diagonally. Solve on Penpa 1.5 Country Road (18 points) Rules Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centers of some cells which passes through each region exactly once. A number in a region represents how many cells in the region are visited by the loop. Orthogonally adjacent cells across a region border may not both be unused. Solve on Penpa 1.11 Co...

Another archival post from puzzles I made a few years ago. This contains a Suguru pack that I made for someone's birthday. It contains classic Suguru as well as common Sudoku variants applied to Suguru. The pack turned out nicely and I got quite some enthusiastic reactions from people who tested it for me. You can download the pack by clicking the image below.

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. ...