Puzzle No. 428 : Double Back

This Puzzle Doubles Back as a practice puzzle for Chennai Brain Games ( http://www.chennaibraingames.in ) held this weekend.

Sometimes, you think, “Ok, thats exactly what I want, I’m gonna get that done”. Sometimes, you think “I’m so tired, let me just try the first thing that pops into my mind and see if it sticks”. Unfortunately, this is the latter. Why am I so busy? That’ll still have to wait. Hopefully I can do a full post on it when I get back home next week.

Anyway,

Double Back rules. I’m sorry, but I don’t have the time/energy to make it color based right now, region based will have to do.

Rated – Medium. (with a lot of little intricacies)

Enjoy!

P428

Puzzle No. 285-289 : Random College Test + Polish Online Qualifier

Daily League Update –

A beautiful Classic Sudoku by Bastien on Wednesday.

A Trio Sudoku for the easy sprint enthusiasts by Rishi today (Thursday).

I’ve been working on many sets recently. One of these is the Polish Championship set. There is one offline qualifier round and one Online qualifier that have been released so far. The final Championships is yet to happen, in March I think. When I was approached for this, I started mainly for the final set, and discarded the easier ones for the offline qualifier. However, the decision to hold the online qualifier was a bit impromptu. They had a shortage of puzzles to hold this. Around the same time, one of my friends here in India approached me to make a set of some quick easy puzzles for a competition in his college. Also, they had apparently forgotten to use my big LITS in the offline round. So the big LITS and 3 out of these 5 were used in the Polish online qualifier as well, as the dates were just after the college offline competition. I won’t be posting the big LITS here as I worked on a theme for all the puzzles meant for the original set, whether they got on it or not, and I’d like to post them together after the final round is over. However, if you’re the impatient kind (like me), here and here are the two qualifiers with the remainder of my puzzles (and some others by other authors).

But anyway, if you can wait for the main themed set in full, here are the easy puzzles that were used in 2 separate events. I did rush a bit through these though.

P285 – Rules for Nurikabe.

P286 – Rules for Simple Loop – Draw a single closed loop passing through every cell in the grid, except the given black cells.

P287 – Rules for Star Battle.

P288 – Rules for Double Back.

P289 – Rules for Masyu.

Enjoy!

P285

P286

P287

P288

P289

 

 

Puzzle No. 185 : Double Back/Star Battle

This is a combination I wanted to try for something else. I know there’s already a loop variant of Star battle called Comet, but I thought of this before I knew about that, and I like the way they combine, so I went with it anyway. But since it was a first timer, I made a trial puzzle, which is what you see below.

Rules – Place exactly one star in every row, column and region. Stars cannot touch each other even diagonally. Stars cannot be placed in cells marked with X. Draw a closed loop passing through every cell except the cells marked with X and cells with stars, that visits every region exactly twice.

Rated – Easy.

Enjoy!

Puzzle No. 185

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