Whoa, a Tapa on this blog! It's been a while.
I'm not entirely sure why, but I can be quite picky about clue variety in Tapa. For example, in this puzzle, every clue consists of two numbers. The grid looks prettier to me this way. Other than that, not much to say.
Here's another small Guide Arrow puzzle. Originally, I wanted to do this theme (symmetric clue placement of arrows all pointing the same way) on a larger grid, but resolving the edges became frustrating and I just couldn't find anything that worked. Adjusting to a smaller grid did the trick. (Yes, I know all my Guide Arrow puzzles have been easy and small on this blog, but I can make big and tricky ones too, I promise!)
What's this, another Numberlink? That's right, and now this genre is getting close to having the most puzzles on this blog. (The current record holder is Cave, even though I haven't posted a puzzle in that genre in 20 months!)
Very happy with this theme. Empty spaces have been a weakness of mine when constructing these, so I tried to be more conscious about looking at places in the grid where paths should turn. That proved quite helpful here.
Once again, thanks to pzprrt for checking uniqueness. My first version was horribly, horribly broken, but I managed to find a fix that made parts of the puzzle more interesting, which was great!
Last year, I had the idea to construct a puzzle contest where there would be 26 puzzles, one themed around each letter of the alphabet. A few friends (WA1729, dohz, Jamie Hargrove, Feadoor) and I got as far as constructing drafts of all 26 puzzles. However, by the time we did, interest in the project had waned down. There were a few reasons for this: the idea wasn't as novel as I thought it was at first, 26 puzzles is a lot for one round, creating the IB and PB was way more work than I realized. (However, it took a very long time and some prodding from dohz to come to this conclusion, because I was too afraid to let the project die. Sorry about that.)
Here are the four puzzles I constructed for this project. Rules for each type can be found under "Help --> Rules" in each of the puzz.link pages.
Here's another Numberlink puzzle, my first 14×24. This theme is a bit similar to some of Casty's numberlinks in Pencil Puzzle Library Numberlink 1, which has some great puzzles in it.
Once again, thanks to pzprrt for checking uniqueness. It does take much longer on 14×24 puzzles than 15×15 ones, so maybe it won't be super useful for 20×36 or 25×25 grids, but it has taken a lot of the grunt work out of constructing these. Still feels like cheating, though.
It's been a few months since we last had one of these on the blog. Here's another one.
This puzzle took a few hours to make, but only because I was being stubborn with the theme. Once I let go of that theme, the puzzle was much easier to make. Thanks to pzprrt for checking uniqueness; it's so fast that it kind of feels like cheating, to be honest.
And another one. It's only been a week or so since this genre was introduced to puzz.link - has this theme gotten old yet? 😅
Guide Arrow is such an interesting genre! The combination of dynasty rules in Heyawake with a "no cycle" condition drives a lot of the solve in ways that are quite remarkable. Resolving open spaces is actually not too bad with these rules! It's also fun just to doodle around and see what happens.
Here are two puzzles I've written within the past few days. The first one is fairly simple, while the second one explores some slightly more interesting things with the genre. These aren't all of the Guide Arrow puzzles I've written, but I made a mistake in one of them and I don't want to share some of the others right now. So here you go.
