IPC 2021 Puzzles

I got to write a few puzzles for the Indian Puzzle Championship this year!  Thanks to Prasanna for allowing me to write puzzles (bold move for a contestant to recommend constructors!).

Puzzles 89 and 90 (Cross the Loop)

Last night in the Puzzler's Club discord, Will Cadegan-Schlieper casually mentioned the idea of a "CTS-like Loop" genre -- that is, Cross the Streams style clues being used to draw a loop instead of shading squares like a nonogram.  (In essence, this is analogous to the difference between Tapa and Tapa-like Loop.)  I immediately jumped on to the idea and created these two puzzles.  The first one was a testing ground on a small grid, while the second one was the "main" puzzle I wanted to create.  Both turned out quite well, and while I'm not sure "Cross the Loop" is a sustainable genre (uniqueness is tricky without a lot of clue packing), I do like the puzzles I've created and think they're worth sharing 🙂.

Rules.   Draw a single closed loop (without intersections or crossings) passing through some empty cells in the grid.  Numbers to the left/top of the grid represent the lengths of all loop segments which are in that row/column in order, either from left to right or from top to bottom.  A question mark (?) represents a loop segment whose size is unknown (but greater than zero); an asterisk (*) represents any number of unknown groups of black cells, including none at all.  Segments perpendicular to the row/column are considered segments of length zero and are not tallied in the row and column clues.

Lonely Two (online interface)

Twos and Threes (online interface)