Mark Sweep's puzzles

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...

Last year I had the pleasure to create some puzzles for the UK Puzzle Championship. Basically I was asked to create some well-known types, some more unfamiliar ones and perhaps a few variants. The UKPC 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.   1.1 Mastermind (10 points) I always like a small word puzzle in contests. That's why I created this one with mostly (stereo)typical words associated with the UK. Rules Identify a secret code comprised of letters (digits in the example). Each row represents a guess at the secret code, with black dots identifying letters that are in the correct position and white dots letters that are in the guess but in a different position to the code. The dots are given in no specific order, and each letter in the secret code contributes at most one dot, with black dots given p...