Tuesday, May 31, 2022

Puzzle 120 ("Rings", Slitherlink)

This puzzle was constructed as a challenge to myself.  I set this clue structure at the start of the puzzle knowing that it was pretty constraining.  (The large spaces in the middle are not the easiest to fill.)  This is the result.  It took way longer to construct than I expected, but I'm happy with how it turned out -- it's quite smooth.  (I did end up needing more chains of 3s than I'd like, but that's a sacrifice I needed to make for my own sanity.)

Online interface


Saturday, May 28, 2022

Puzzle 119 ("White Hole", Simple Loop)

I'm quite surprised this Simple Loop puzzle is unique.  Wasn't super hard to find, either!

EDIT: Turns out agnomy discovered this puzzle a few years ago.  Oh well! 

Online interface


Friday, May 27, 2022

Puzzle 118 (Full Midloop)

Midloop is such a fun genre to solve and construct.  My style for midloop constructions is to be "minimalistic", in a sense.  It's pretty easy to construct a puzzle that feels severely overclued, and it's a nice challenge to try to get away with relatively few clues while still having a unique solution and a nice solve.  The "full" midloop variant is even better at this!

Classic Midloop rules apply.  Additionally, the loop must pass through all cells.

Online interface


Sunday, May 22, 2022

Puzzle 117 ("Border Clues", Mochikoro)

Here's a nice contrasting theme to yesterday's puzzle.  This one was actually pretty easy to construct, and I'm happy with how it turned out.  Mochikoro is a genre that can enable lots of nice flowing puzzles 😀

Online interface


Saturday, May 21, 2022

Puzzle 116 ("Borderless", Yin-Yang)

I've actually had this puzzle sitting around for a few months and completely forgot about it until now.  Oops!

The origin story of this puzzle comes from PANFOPCWHTTAPA 2.  Originally, we planned to have Yin-Yang as one of the genres in the contest, since the rules for Yin-Yang are pretty simple and don't involve numbers.  I constructed this puzzle as a potential candidate for the contest, but I got cold feet as I wasn't sure if it was too hard, so I posted it to Puzzler's Club instead.

This symbolizes the problems with having Yin-Yang on a beginner's contest: a lot of the logic is driven by the border and checkerboard rules, which we would have needed to disclose beforehand.  In the end, we decided (two weeks before the contest date!) to ditch Yin-Yang and have Nurikabe instead as our last genre.  (This is actually the reason why Nurikabe is last in the PANFOPCWHTTAPA list when all the other genres are alphabetically ordered!)

Online interface


Tuesday, May 17, 2022

Puzzle 115 (Kakuro)

Here's a Kakuro puzzle.  I originally wrote this a few months ago, intending to use it for some other project, but after coming back to the puzzle I decided it wasn't necessary.

Online interface (Penpa)

Online interface (puzz.link)