It's been months since I made these, but now that the international version of the 2023 Mustang Math Tournament is complete, I can finally post some of them on my blog!
This year, we decided to go with Double Choco as our genre of choice. I wasn't responsible for almost all the puzzles this year, mainly because of the Logic Puzzle Open; massive thanks to Linus Tang for writing some of them as well. That said, I did manage to construct several puzzles that I like enough to replicate here.
First are two vanilla puzzles. These are on the easier side but still have some interesting interactions. The second grid was originally written for the Open but we decided in the end to not use it.
The third puzzle here showcases the first of our variants, Desweetful. This is equivalent to Double Choco (Knapp-Daneben): each number is one off the correct area of the half-region it's contained in. (For example, a number "6" would be contained in a region of size 5+5 or 7+7.) Tough one.
The fourth puzzle here showcases our second variant, Triple Choco (though I personally prefer the Neopolitan coat of paint 😛). Each region now consists of three congruent parts, one from each color. The theme I chose here was a pain in the butt; connectivity becomes highly restrictive. In fact, this puzzle is almost unique without the clues in box 5, which is surprising!
Finally, we have our last and weirdest variant, Interlocko. In this variant, all internal segments have length at most N, where N is the number given in the corner of the grid. (This is not the same as "all regions have edge lengths at most N", which is a more natural constraint but harder to construct.) This puzzle is a bit fiddly in places but still has some nice logic. Somewhat more intriguing is that, according to semiexp, this grid almost works as a vanilla! It may have an unreasonable solve, though; I haven't checked. Maybe it's possible to turn this into a valid vanilla grid?
Overall, as you may be able to tell from some of these puzzles, this year's round was significantly harder than last year's. It turns out we made the round a bit too hard, as several teams apparently had no idea what they were doing. Despite this, contestants enjoyed the round a lot, which says a lot about the novelty of pen-and-paper puzzles in math contests.
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