Puzzle 173 (Arithmetic Square)

To close this week-long tour of Logic Puzzle Open unused constructions, here's a puzzle from an entire genre that didn't make the cut: Arithmetic Square!  This is a puzzle type that most people are probably familiar with even if they haven't done this explicit genre before, but in the end we decided to limit the number of math genres in that round.

Rules: Place each of the numbers 1 through 9, one per cell, so that the indicated arithmetic operations hold when read left-right or up-down.  (There are normally a few extra rules for how expressions should be parse, but they're not needed here.)

Online interface (Penpa)

Puzzle 172 ("Tilted", Sudoku)

Oh my, a Classic Sudoku!  I'm not good at constructing these, but I decided to give them a shot for the Open.  This was originally the most difficult Sudoku, but we decided to nerf the round a bit and so this puzzle got chopped.  

Online Interface (f-puzzles)

Online Interface (puzz.link) 

Puzzle 171 ("Diagonal Alley", Akari)

Akari is one of the most pleasant and flowy genres to solve, I believe, so it was a no-brainer to include in the Open.  This puzzle was originally constructed to be the difficulty 1 Akari, but we decided it was a bit too difficult for that purpose. 

Online interface 

Puzzle 170 ("Statue", Numberlink)

Yes, we had to include Numberlink as a genre in the Logic Puzzle Open.  Lots of people know the type as Flow Free®, and we were conscious about inserting several types that would be familiar to many of the contestants.  This was one of the puzzles I made for potential use in the competition.  It has a nice visual theme and flows nicely, but has slightly higher clue density than I'd like.

Online interface (puzz.link) 

Puzzle 169 ("Diamond", Creek)

Creek is a very nice beginner-friendly genre, and I wanted to include it in the Logic Puzzle Open ever since we came up with the idea.  This was my original attempt at the first puzzle in that set.  It's certainly not bad, but there are some parts that may have been a bit too subtle for that position.  In any case, the Creek 1 that actually showed up is quite good as well.

Online interface (puzz.link)

Puzzle 168 ("Empty Diagonal", Chocolate Banana)

Next in our tour is this Chocolate Banana puzzle.  I really like this genre!  There are a lot of cool things one can do with Chocolate Banana grids, although sometimes resolving parts of the puzzle can be a pain if you're aiming for a visual theme.

This puzzle was originally going to be the difficulty 1 puzzle, but I decided that I wanted the easiest Chocolate Banana to focus more on pairs of orthogonally adjacent clues.

Online interface

Puzzle 167 ("Circle of Doubles", Tapa)

Next up in the Logic Puzzle Open unused puzzles tour is this Tapa construction.  Originally intended to be the Tapa 1, I think?  I don't entirely remember.  This puzzle may have just been forgotten about during test construction.  It has a cute visual theme, but the solve path is not entirely special; I like the ones that appeared on the contest better.

Online interface

 

Puzzle 166 ("Empty Middle", Slitherlink)

Hi!  It's been a while.  For the past few months, I've been writing puzzles for a competition which was hosted yesterday on MIT's campus.  It went well!  We had about 40 people show up, and the general feedback was that apart from some minor complaints in places the event went well overall 😊.  The puzzles from the event can be found here; please do check them out when you can!

Over the next several days (probably sporadically) I'll post some of the puzzles I made which did not show up during the competition.  This first puzzle was a Slitherlink that was initially meant to be the easiest puzzle.  However, we realized that it was too long and slightly too difficult for that position, so we ended up making a much smaller one for the first spot.  It has the same theme, though.

Online interface (puzz.link)