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.
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.
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.
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.
As promised, a large and tricky Guide Arrow! This one isn't crazy difficult, but it does have one especially tricky bit during the middle of the solve. I also find the grid to be especially aesthetic.
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!
