Masyu with a full loop constraint is ridiculously powerful. A little too powerful, sometimes. This grid is antisymmetric but there's still good logic to be had here! (Though part of that is also due to the ... very large hole in the center of the grid. Unfortunately, 169 is odd.)
Rules: Classic Masyu rules apply. Additionally, the loop must pass through all cells.
During the Karaoke session at WPC, Elyot Grant set up an Islands of Insight showcase which explored parts of the game not found in the public demo (including some of IHNN's post-game puzzles, which are ... not easy). I wasn't able to play the public demo because my laptop isn't designed for gaming, so this was my first experience with the game. It's great! I'm very much looking forward to the full release (though I may need to invest in a better machine to play it, oops).
I'm now interested in contributing puzzles to the game, so we'll see how that goes. Here's one puzzle that could conceivably appear within the game, at least from the perspective of the ruleset. It's probably too hard, though.
Rules: Shade some empty cells black so that each number indicates the total count of white cells connected vertically and horizontally to that number including the numbered cell itself. Black cells must form dominos which cannot share an edge, and all white cells must belong to a single connected group. Additionally, no 2×2 subgrid of cells can be entirely unshaded.
Here's one more puzzle originally submitted to the WPC. This construction was meant for the Number Placement playoffs, but didn't quite make it because it was too hard. (I think I underestimated difficulty somewhat because of my own struggles with Skyscrapers as a genre.)
Rules: Insert numbers into some cells of the grid so that each row and column of the grid contains the numbers from 1 to 5 once each and one gap. Each number in the grid represents the height of a building and each clue outside the grid indicates how many buildings can be "seen" while looking from that direction. Taller buildings block the view of smaller buildings. Gaps do not block the view of any building.
WSPC 2023 is over! Thank you to everyone who showed up either as a competitor or as a volunteer; you all made this week memorable. 😄 More to come in a blog post later.
In the meantime, have a Canal View. WPC competitors will probably recognize the grid, but this puzzle is not the same as the one appearing on the contest. Unfortunately, this version did not make the actual contest (possibly because I sent it off later, possibly because it's too susceptible to uniqueness) but I'm extremely proud of it regardless.
Hi, it's been a bit since my last post! Have an Aquapelago to celebrate. This is a recent genre from Walker Anderson that has gained a lot of traction in various puzzle circles now that it's been added to puzz.link. This grid should be a smooth solve, I hope.
Another day, another Slitherlink. This one was also inspired by a wolog theme, but being the constructor I am, I decided to expand the scope of the theme a bit.
My main goal with this puzzle was to make a region that is densely clued but still ambiguous for large portions of the solve. This is still fairly tough for me to pull off, but I think I did it here.
I constructed a Classic Sudoku for the 2023 US Sudoku Qualifying Test! (Past me would be in shambles rn.) Wei-Hwa essentially constructed an entire contest in three days; I decided to chip in a random Sudoku because I had no intentions of actually competing.
The grid below is not the puzzle appearing on the actual test. Instead, it was the "first draft" of that puzzle -- one I sent to Wei-Hwa first before finding the harder grid. (At least, it's harder according to Andrew's Sudoku Solver; the USSQT puzzle has grade 82, while the below puzzle has grade 51.)
