Puzzle No. 297 – 312 : Zeka 2013 Puzzle Set

I realize I’m crossing 300 with this without the usual special puzzle, but with Puzzle Marathon coming up, I’m sure everyone will have their fill of special puzzles. I’ll make it up later sometime between 300 and 400. Anyway, this was a 1 hour set at the Croatian competition. I basically started off with trying 1 classic puzzle and one variant of it, but then some pairings are just similar genres. For the variants, I’ll just put the additional rules. The Classic puzzles have links to their rules, and some are fully described here. The difficulties are obviously varied but barring the Pentomino I can’t immediately think of anything particularly difficult. All puzzles tested by Bram De Laat.

Enjoy!

P297 : Bosnian Road.

P297

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P298 : Bosnian Road Odd Even – The clues only give the information that the number in that clue cell is either Odd (O) or Even(E). All the clue substitutions are non-zero.

P298

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P299 : Masyu.

P299

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P300 : Corral Masyu – The cells not visited by the loop must be able to reach the edge of the grid by being orthogonally connected to other such cells.

P300

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P301 : Hashi (Probably the easiest puzzle of the set) – Draw single or double straight lines between the circled numbers. The number in a circle indicates how many lines must end there. The lines must run horizontally or vertically and must not cross or branch off. All circles must be connected to each other; i.e. it must be possible to travel from any circle to any other circle following the lines..

P301

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P302 : Gokigen naname (Known as Slalom in some places like Croco Puzzle) – Draw exactly one diagonal line in each cell of the diagram. A number in some intersections of the grid lines denote how many diagonal lines end in this intersection. The diagonal lines must not form a closed loop.

P302

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P303 : Norinori

P303

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P304 : Trio Cut – Paint some cells to make some triminos so that each trimino will be cut twice by thick lines. Each region bordered by thick lines should have 3 painted cells.

P304

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P305 : Easy As ABC (Range – A-C)

P305

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P306 : Easy as ABC Untouch – Additionally, same letters cannot touch each other even diagonally. Range is A-D.

P306

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P307 : Nurikabe

P307

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P308 : Cipher Nurikabe – The numbers are replaced by letters. All instances of the same letter have same values and different letters have different values. Note that the rule says values, so one letter can stand for a multi-digit number too.

P308

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P309 : Tapa

P309

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P310 : Disjoint Groups Tapa – Additionally, clues in the same box cannot have the same position around them shaded. E.g. 2 clues in the same box cannot both have the cell directly above them shaded.

P310

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P311 : Pentomino – Place the 12 Pentomino pieces into the grid. They can be rotated and reflected. They cannot be placed in black cells. Two pieces cannot touch each other even diagonally. The numbers outside give the number of cells occupied by pentomino pieces in that row or column. Pentominos given at the end of the post.

P311

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P312 : Pentomino Areas – Instead of the numbers outside, the grid is divided into regions, each of which consists of exactly one entire pentomino.

P312

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Puzzle No. 259 : Bosnian Road

This is just a placeholder actually. I’ll be posting a puzzle sometime in the next 24 hours again as a temporary come-out of my new 48 hour schedule.

This weekend is the Contest titled Best of LMI Puzzle Test, featuring 2 puzzles from numerous past LMI tests from Nikoli Selection to Akil Oyunlari Magazine Competition. You can also still vote (for about another 2 days) for your favorite LMI Sudoku and/or Puzzle tests of 2012 here.

Ok, back to today’s puzzle, or placeholder puzzle. I was just experimenting on a numberless Bosnian Road. Of course, such gimmicks might border on boring sometimes, but I feel this may be a good basic version of the puzzle, kinda like a Simple Loop that uses a no touching rule instead of “all cells must be filled” rule. Anyways, this one isn’t much in terms of difficulty or quality as I was just getting an idea of how things work.

Rules for Bosnian Road

Rated : Easy.

Enjoy!

P259

Puzzle No. 247-256 : Chinese Beginners’ Puzzle Contest

Between writing puzzles for the Polish Championship, preparing for a Sudoku Workshop I’ll be conducting this Saturday, the usual solving side of things, and the fact that its submissions time in college, I’ve been way too busy again. If you still haven’t tried, today is the last day of the December Edition of LMI Beginners’ Sudoku Contest. The author is Tom Collyer and the variants are Untouch, Killer, Outside, Anti Knight, along with the 4 Classics as usual.

Coming up this weekend is the 3rd LMI Screen Test. This one’s a bit different from the last 2, but similar in concept. There are 30 6×6 Sudokus to be solved with all kinds of variations. The solving will all be on the online interface, with no pdfs. The duration is 60 minutes of solving time (not counting the 15 seconds to read instructions that can be ended manually). The designer is Deb Mohanty.

While I’m at it, I’m looking for a team to join in the Croco Liga. Any takers?

Anyways, today’s post is just the 10 puzzles I sent for the Beginners’ Puzzle Contest hosted at the Sudokufans site, and also, I am told, an offline event in Beijing. The requirement was 10 easy/medium puzzles of 5 different genres. The genres, in order, are Yajilin, Tapa, Norinori, LITS, Bosnian Road. Click on the puzzle names for rules.

Enjoy!

Puzzle 212-215 : Hungarian Championship Bosnian Roads

Firstly, Borders & Beyond is now over. You can find a Solutions booklet with my thoughts on the puzzles linked to in the forum here.

The coming weekend sees a short-duration test authored by Rohan Rao called 123GO, and yea, it is nice to have 2 Indians (well 2 guys from the same building, for anyone who doesn’t know yet!) authoring LMI tests in consecutive weekends. The test itself has 19 puzzles and is an 80-minute test so I suppose the puzzles will be of an easier difficulty than the ones in Borders & Beyond It looks to be a fun test and even though the WSC-WPC IBs are out, I think sparing 80 minutes on this one will be some good practice for the short-time rounds that will be there in the WCs.

So anyway, my break from creating is now over, but I first needed to get my 10 newspaper puzzles done today. I planned to do some more, including 1-2 for the blog, but I couldn’t get time as there is a festival going on here in India. Anyway, what I can do is display the puzzles I contributed to the Hungarian Championships on Zoltán Horváth‘s request. He has told me Zoltán Gyimesi has won both Hungarian Championships so Congrats to him and I look forward to meeting both Zoltáns and the rest of the Hungarian team in Croatia

Anyway, my mind’s wandering. He asked me if I could send 4 Bosnian Roads, and I was quite fine with that since I really like creating this genre.

Rules for Bosnian Road - Draw a continuous snake-like loop of one-cell width, that does not touch itself, even diagonally. It does not go through clue cells. The clues indicate how many of the 8(or less for edges and corners) cells around the clue cell the loop passes through. This does not necessarily imply that all these cells have to be passed through at once, they can be broken up too(I guess you can think of them as Minesweeper-like clues).

So here they are -

Puzzle 208-210 – Bosnian Road, Diagonal Neighbors Tapa, Domino Loop

Update – The Tapa Diagonal Neighbors has now been fixed. Thanks to Para for pointing out the error. Apologies to anyone who began to solve it. 

I’m back home after a week away in South India, where I got burnt alive 80 % of the time. The other 20 % of the time, I tried to create a few puzzles. The majority of these have gone towards my newspaper employers, and another percentage will be held back for future tests, etc. But a few have nowhere to go and shall therefore be here for all to see, and hopefully enjoy. The first of these, I actually made just before my trip. I had to create a few Bosnian Roads for a competition, and I ended up wanting to do one more. The second one, Is a failed attempt at trying something with my Diagonal Neighbors Tapa variant. Its still alright to solve though. The last one, I again forgot that my favorite dimensions of 13×13 are not suitable for a domino-based puzzle. So the little cross mark, but I was just about able to shift it right to the corner for what its worth. This puzzle has some very tricky starting steps, but goes smoothly towards the end once you get through them. In any case, I do believe its a better “introduction puzzle” than the marathon I threw at you puzzle lovers as my 200th.

On a side note, the September Edition of LMI Beginners’ Sudoku Contests has begun and as organizer, I invite and encourage all Sudoku enthusiasts  (beginners/newcomers especially) to participate.

All puzzles below rated Medium to Hard.

Rules for Bosnian Road - Draw a continuous snake-like loop of one-cell width, that does not touch itself, even diagonally. It does not go through clue cells. The clues indicate how many of the 8(or less for edges and corners) cells around the clue cell the loop passes through. This does not necessarily imply that all these cells have to be passed through at once, they can be broken up too(I guess you can think of them as Minesweeper-like clues).

Rules for Diagonal Neighbors Tapa – Follow regular Tapa rules. Additionally, every shaded cell must have at least one diagonally adjacent shaded cell. A “?” clue functions as any other non-zero numeric clue, you just need to determine what the number is.

Rules for Domino Loop - Shade in some cells such that every region has 2 shaded cells and every shaded cell has exactly one shaded cell orthogonally adjacent to it. Additionally, draw a loop passing through all the remaining cells and passing through every region exactly once. Cells marked with “X” contain neither domino cells nor loop segments.

Puzzle No. 208 : Bosnian Road

Puzzle No. 209 : Tapa Diagonal Neighbors

Puzzle No. 210 : Domino Loop

Puzzle No. 196 and 197 : Bosnian Road, Tapa

Update : I was all ready to post this last night, but wordpress bailed on me again. Even now I had to go back to the base html to make the upload and post. Bah. 

Its been a mad few days. I am already exhausted with a hectic weekend ahead Anyway, I’ll upload whatever I can. I made these 2 quickly yesterday but as I said in the non-puzzle post earlier, there’s been a problem with wordpress.

Rated : Around easy and medium.

Rules for Bosnian Road – Draw a continuous snake-like loop of one-cell width, that does not touch itself, even diagonally. It does not go through clue cells. The clues indicate how many of the 8(or less for edges and corners) cells around the clue cell the loop passes through. This does not necessarily imply that all these cells have to be passed through at once, they can be broken up too(I guess you can think of them as Minesweeper-like clues).

Rules for Tapa.

Enjoy!

Puzzle No. 196

Puzzle No. 197

Puzzle No. 188 : Bosnian Road

I did this kinda suddenly.

Rules for Bosnian Road – Draw a continuous snake-like loop of one-cell width, that does not touch itself, even diagonally. It does not go through clue cells. The clues indicate how many of the 8(or less for edges and corners) cells around the clue cell the loop passes through. This does not necessarily imply that all these cells have to be passed through at once, they can be broken up too(I guess you can think of them as Minesweeper-like clues).

Rated : Medium. 

Enjoy!

Puzzle No. 188

Puzzle No. 179 : Bosnian Road/Masyu

I created this while I was waiting for a chat reply on facebook O.o and I messed up the dimensions in the process of putting it from my brain to my notebook. After making it, it seemed a waste not to put it up anyway, so here it is. Enjoy it like you would enjoy any conventional puzzles or it’ll feel left out and sue you for dimensional discrimination.

Rules for Bosnian Road – Draw a continuous snake-like loop of one-cell width, that does not touch itself, even diagonally. It does not go through clue cells. The clues indicate how many of the 8(or less for edges and corners) cells around the clue cell the loop passes through. This does not necessarily imply that all these cells have to be passed through at once, they can be broken up too(I guess you can think of them as Minesweeper-like clues).

Additionally, there are black and white circles that determine the turns of the loop using Masyu rules.

Rated : Easy-ish.

Enjoy!

Puzzle No. 179

 

Puzzle No. 175 : Bosnian Road [Double Back]

Sorry about the lack of puzzle for a day. I guess the busy year just never stops piling up on me. I’ll keep trying my very best though

Today’s puzzle is a variation using 2 puzzles I’ve never created before, and not solved much of either, so I don’t really know how good it is O.o But I’ll carry on with the post as if I know my stuff anyway..

I got introduced to the Bosnian Road puzzle type by Murat Can Tonta. He thinks its a glorified slitherlink(in a good way though). I think its a fun puzzle anyway, with a bit more possibilities. I’m still in that weird mode where I just want to do hybrids and variations. So I did a variation inspired by Palmer’s Double Back without the need for all cells to be visited of course, and I’ll save the colors for when I make a standalone Double Back

Rules for Bosnian Road –  Draw a continuous snake-like loop of one-cell width, that does not touch itself, even diagonally. The clues indicate how many of the 8(or less for edges and corners) cells around the clue cell the loop passes through. This does not necessarily imply that all these cells have to be passed through at once, they can be broken up too(I guess you can think of them as  Minesweeper-like clues).

Additionally, the loop must visit every thickly outlined region exactly twice.

Rated : Medium.

Enjoy!

Puzzle No. 175