I've continued to supply puzzles for the Mustang Math Tournament! While MMT is primarily a math contest for middle school students (mostly written by high school students), there is one round every year which introduces a pencil puzzle genre. In previous tournaments, we've covered Fillomino, Double Choco, and Slitherlink. We give students an overview of the rules, a sample puzzle, and some variants, and ask them to solve as many puzzles as possible. Some years are harder than others (the Double Choco round in 2023 was particularly nasty...) but we try to make the puzzle set accessible overall, with a few hard puzzles sprinkled in because I can't resist.
Last year, we decided to go for Cave. We explicitly gave "no checkerboard" as a rule rather than something students needed to figure out for themselves. Overall, the Cave round seemed to be easier than the Double Choco round from 2023, but harder than the Slitherlink round from 2024, which is not surprising.
I wrote most of the puzzles for the round, with Pranshu (a high school junior at the time) supplying the remaining grids. Each section had a particularly tricky puzzle at the end, much harder than the rest of the set. Here are those capstone puzzles; if you want the full set, let me know!
First up, the hardest classic cave. This might actually be the toughest puzzle in the entire round; there are some tricky steps here!
Next is the first variant: Product. In this variant, clues represent the product of the number of cells seen horizontally and the number seen vertically. Also pretty tough.
Third is the second variant: No 2×2. In this variant, no 2×2 square in the grid can be entirely shaded or entirely unshaded. I think the usual ruleset considers just shaded cells; this particular version is from WPC 2023 in Toronto.
Finally, we have a puzzle which combines the Product and No 2x2 variants. Because Cave can be difficult to grasp, we decided to have two variants instead of the usual three. Combining both variants made for an easier solve path overall, so I wanted to make sure this grid still had some bite to it.
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