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 I w

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 round was worth

Five cells and pentominous are obviously quite similar in a way. Hence this hybrid. Enjoy! Rules Divide the grid into regions of five orthogonally connected cells so that no two regions of the same shape share an edge, counting rotations and reflections as the same. Letter clues must belong to a region with the pentomino shape associated with that letter (see here ). Number clues indicate the number of edges around the clue, including the border of the grid. Solve online