No comment (too tired).
Rated – Medium.
P432
Category Corral
Puzzle No. 411-414 : UKPC 2013 Puzzles
Edit: Congratulations to Neil Zussman from UK, the overall winner.
Following up from my non-puzzle post before this, I’m still not well folks. And my laptop’s still not fixed. Overall, not a good time. I’m just hoping everything becomes fine by the time the Championships come along.
Speaking of Championships, the UK Puzzle Championship was held recently, around the same time as the IPC. I contributed 4 puzzles to the UKPC. Two of these were fairly common types, Nurikabe and Corral. I had been doing many Kurotto and Yosenabe puzzles around this time, Yosenabe in particular seemed fresh, so I used that and themed a UK into it, adding to my other UK themed puzzle, the Corral. For the other puzzle, I actually wanted to do either a snake variant or a true-false type puzzle. As is usually the cases with me I just ended up combining both and we have True-False Snake.
Anyway, to the puzzles, (with points as they were awarded to each during the UKPC).
P411: Nurikabe. 15 points.
P412: Yosenabe – Move all circles, vertically or horizontally, so they enter the grey areas. Show the movement of a circle by an arrow, with the tip of the arrow in the first cell it enters of its grey area. Arrows can cross through grey areas if they need to reach a grey area beyond. The arrows do not bend, and do not cross other white circles or lines of other arrows. The number in a grey area must be equal to the sum of the numbers of the circles which enter the area. Empty grey areas may have any sum total, but at least one circle must enter each grey area. Example with solution. 20 points.
P413: Corral. 20 points.
P414: True-False Snake – Draw a snake in the grid of unknown length. The head and tail of the snake are given. The body of the snake cannot touch itself, not even diagonally. The numbers indicate the number of cells the snake visits in the direction of the arrow. If the snake does not pass through a clue cell, then that clue is true, otherwise, it is false. Example with solution. 40 points.
Enjoy!
P411
P412
P413
P414
Puzzle No. 382-396 : Czech Puzzle Championship Puzzles
I think this was a set I wrote when I wasn’t that well. That’s not meant as an excuse, but as a warning – I tend to make things harder when I’m ill. However, some of these are also rejects from newspaper bunches for being not-too-easy (Heyawake for example) which means there’s some easy in there too. Unlike my previous puzzle set posts, I decided to find out a bit more this time, which basically means that I can add the points that were assigned to each puzzle. The Skyscrapers Pentomino was not used, but since it was not used for being too hard, I’ve simply valued it at points higher than any of the others.
The Championship had 5 rounds and then a playoff at the end. The first round had the largest time slot and so two of the hardest puzzles of my set, the Yajisan Kazusan and the Shakashaka were moved into that round. Two others, Heyawake and Multiplicative Corral were moved to the Playoff/Final. There’s no point valuing for these, but I’d put their difficulty around the LITS or the Country Road, something of a medium difficulty.
There were 25 participants, and Jan Novotný emerged as the winner, mainly by having a good playoff, as Matej Uher was ahead after the first 5 rounds (377.8 – 299.2). In fact, Jan was 4th before the playoffs, behind Jana Vodičková (332.5) and Jakub Hrazdira (306). Congrats to him, and the other qualifiers. For my round (the 4th round, valued at 110 points), the top scorers were Matej Uher (85), Jakub Ondroušek (77) and Jakub Hrazdira (62). I’m posting only my own puzzles but as a test solver for the event in general, I did have access to the other puzzles too, and the quality is quite high throughout. If you’re interested in knowing more, or you are a Czech/Slovakian interested in becoming a member of the HALAS Association (where I think you will gain access to all these puzzles), I’d suggest you contact Jiří Hrdina, who co-ordinated/organized this Championship.
Rules/links and points –
P382 : Bosnian Road (8 points).
P383 : Country Road (12 points).
P384 : Easy As Tapa (14 points) – Follow regular Tapa rules. Clues outside must be placed in the first unshaded cell in that row or column.
P385 : Fillomino (7 points).
P386 : Heyawake (Playoff puzzle).
P387 : LITS (12 points).
P388 : Masyu [Alternative] (4 points) – Follow regular Masyu rules. Additionally, the loop cannot pass two circles of the same colour continuously.
P389 : Multiplicative Corral (Playoff Puzzle) – Draw a single closed loop along the grid lines that contains all the numbered squares and does not touch itself, not even at a point. Each given number is the product of two numbers: the number of interior squares that are directly in line vertically with that number’s square (including the square itself) times the number of interior squares that are directly in line horizontally with that number’s square (again, including that square itself).
P390 : Nanro (14 points).
P391 : Norinori (5 points).
P392 : Product Heyawacky (25 points). Follow regular Heyawacky rules. Additionally, the number at the top left of a cage is the product of shaded cells in each different region, only pertaining to its area within the cage.
P393 : Shakashaka (40 points).
P394 : Skyscraper Pentomino (60 points?). (Edit – It should be noted that the puzzle in the link has “X” marks where pentominos can’t be placed, whereas the puzzle below has black cells denoting that)
P395 : Sum Skyscraper (9 points). Follow regular Skyscrapers rules. This skyscraper uses the digits 1~7. The numbers outside indicate the sum of the visible digits.
P396 : Yajisan Kazusan (40 points).
Now, the puzzles! Enjoy!
P382
P383
P384
P385
P386
P387
P388
P389
P390
P391
P392
P393
P394
P395
P396
Puzzle No. 316 – 336 : Polish Championship set
I’d mentioned a few posts earlier, that I’d contributed some puzzles to the Polish Championships this year. There was an offline qualifier, an online qualifier, the finals, and the playoffs. I think there was a good share of my puzzles in all 4 of these rounds. Its pretty confusing which was used where, since I’ve not organized it that well in my folders, so I’ll just post all the themed ones together (as mentioned in that post linked to above, the online qualifier had puzzles that I used simultaneously elsewhere and were more of a hurried solution).
The theme I was working on should be pretty obvious on seeing all the puzzles. It started with the easier Tapa, which I made completely by accident while writing a bunch of newspaper puzzles, and then I just tried a similar thing with the Corral and that happened quickly too. So, just decided to go along with it, discarded those two from the newspaper bunch and started off the Polish set with them. I couldn’t really try and retry the puzzles to get the exact appearances I wanted, and this is apparent from the 2 LITS and the Killer Sudoku among other ones. The LITS is of course something difficult that I set myself to do in a pretty short timespace, as both LITS were required hurriedly for the qualifiers, and to make it have duplicated regions throughout on the first try seems almost impossible, at least for me.
Anyway, here they are. As with the Zeka set, rules are either linked to by the puzzle names or just added here. These puzzles have varying difficulties, but I don’t think anything was exceptionally hard.
Enjoy!
P316 – ABC Box – Fill the grid with letters A, B and C. The clues outside give the sequence of letters in that row or column. If the clue is a number, that is the number of times a letter appears in that position of the sequence (Which letter is determined while solving). If the clue is a letter then that letter appears in that position of the sequence (The number of times it appears continuously is determined while solving). A “?” means that an unknown letter is appearing an unknown number of times in that position of the sequence.
P316
P317 : Akari.
P317
P318 : Corral.
P318
P319 : Country Road.
P319
P320, 321 : Fillomino.
P320
P321
P322 : Heyawacky.
P322
P323 : Killer Sudoku 8×8 – Follow regular sudoku rules. Additionally, the numbers at the top left of a cage gives the sum of numbers in that cage. Numbers cannot repeat in a cage.
P323
P324, 325 : LITS
P324
P325
P326 : Masyu
P326
P327 : Pentasight
P327
P328 : Pentopia
P328
P329, 330 : The Persistence of Memory
P329
P330
P331 : Regional Yajilin
P331
P332, 333 : Tapa
P332
P333
P334 : Tapa Skyscrapers
P334
P335 : Yajilin
P335
P336 : Yajisan Kazusan
P336
Puzzle No. 137 : Corral
Puzzle No. 92 : Corral [Diagonal Vision]
First of all, I made 5 typos, 2 grammatical errors, and worst of all, 2 errors in the puzzle in yesterday’s post. I sincerely apologize for all that, we all have our bad days I suppose. Mine apparently involves editing the same post about 10 times. It is, as of this afternoon, finally fixed completely. I thought this might have something to do with the fact that I rushed the post to get it done before midnight. Therefore, I’ve taken some time out and created today’s now itself.
Secondly, I’ll put up pending solutions in a day or two.
Now finally to today’s puzzle. This will most probably be the last of my little diagonal series for now, nice timing I suppose as Diagonal Vision on LMI is also ending today. 😛
Follow regular Corral rules.
Difference is, the clues, instead of showing visibility in orthogonal directions, show the visibility from the cell(including itself just like in normal Corral) in diagonal directions. The “?”s are just cells within the loop and can be any number.
Rated : Easy.
Solution here. Password – DC
Enjoy!
Puzzle No. 92
Puzzle No. 62-82 : My birthday puzzles!
Because, even though I’m gonna be stuck in college on my birthday, doesn’t mean all of you shouldn’t enjoy yourselves. The regular readers of this blog will know, I’ve been struggling to even put up a single puzzle on most days. So in preparing this, obviously most would be easy, and some of them may even fall under the category of “Evil Zingers”. However, I do think quite a few of them are fun, and the last one is probably one of my best. Heh, anyway, you decide.
This set features my first attempt at a Liar Loop, and a non-variant Slalom. 🙂
That should do for today’s puzzle post I suppose. Enjoy!
Update : Apparently the PDF is crashing for some people. The error is for some reason that it requires a Japanese Fonts plug in. For what its worth, I downloaded the same and its completely fine. But of course, you may want an alternative, so I’m uploading just the PNG formats of all puzzles in the rar file, with a txt file for the rules and descriptions. The solutions PDF is fine I suppose.
Hope that fixes any issues. 🙂
Puzzle No. 57 : Corral
Because of the fact that I’m totally exhausted and purely running on adrenaline with about 2 hours of college work remaining ahead of me, I dashed the symmetry, made a few quick fixes and all in all, probably not one of the best examples of my creative abilities. However, fortunately, I think most of the intended solving path still remains, though you can fill in some independently in other areas. How about starting at the top left and not looking at the other corners till you get there though? 🙂
Rated : Medium.
Solution here. Password – SC
Enjoy!
Puzzle No. 57
Puzzle No. 45 : Corrals
First of all, I sincerely apologize for the 1st of these. I couldn’t resist 😛
Happy Valentine’s day folks!
Rules for Corral. <in below puzzles, “?” can mean any number and must be part of the corral loop>
Corral 1 : Ridiculously easy.
Corral 2 : Medium.
Solutions here. Password : HC
Enjoy!
Puzzle No. 45 Corral 1
Puzzle No. 45 Corral 2
Puzzle No. 25 : Corral [25×25]
Yes yes, not very subtle to mention it in the title but I do believe the dimensions save some needless counting in Corral puzzles. Anyway, this wasn’t supposed to be today’s entry, but 25’s supposed to be some kind of a mini-landmark right? On a side note, I’ll post all the pending solutions and get up to date on 27th hopefully 🙂
Rated : Marathon. Solution here. Password : 25.
Enjoy!
Puzzle No. 25
PS's puzzles + 