Puzzle No. 493 : Maxi Loop + LMI Patreon Update

Hello, dearest readers! Its… been a while. Sorry about that. I feel I’ll have more time for this place come May. For now, I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that Logic Masters India has started its own Patronage system. Please check out our page on Patreon and on LMI itself. The Puzzle pack rewards are currently all written by me, but future ones will definitely have other Indian authors involved too. If you like the hosting features LMI has to offer and/or find the rewards enticing enough, please consider supporting us. I’ve taken up a few things on behalf of LMI here in India, all towards making our group more recognized in the country. Funding certainly helps this.

Anyway, I feel a little bad that I’m only making a blog post when I want to promote something, so here’s a Maxi Loop puzzle to go along with it. I hope you enjoy it!

Rules for Maxi Loop.

Rated – Easy with a slight pause.

Solution.

P493

Puzzle No. 488 – Fillomino [Instructive]

Check this post for reference on this blog’s 3 main types of posts from now on.

The instructive post-type is (for now) mainly a way to “rehearse” my way of explanation for a certain target audience, while also giving the general puzzle solvers an easy puzzle to solve. I will not cover any complex techniques here, because the end result I’m looking at is designing a curriculum with more detailed explanations. I will mostly just hint at the starting point and a basic technique that’s necessary to solve the puzzle in question.

The instructive PDF’s definitely just for complete newcomers to the puzzle type, so I’m posting the puzzle image below the PDF anyway, so the experienced solvers can solve it directly.

PDF – Fillomino_Instructive

Enjoy!

P488

Puzzle No. 465, 466 : 5 Stars, Every Second Straight

These are the last of the WPC practice puzzles.

Rules  (as in WPC IB) –

For 465 (Serbian Snacks, round 7) – Place five stars into the grid so that their cells do not touch each other or cells with numbers, not even diagonally. One of the stars is large and covers 3 x 3 cells, the others are small and cover a single cell. Digits denote the number of cells occupied by stars in the same row/column.

For 466 (Dutch Delight, round 4) – Draw a single closed loop that consists of horizontal and vertical segments and visits every cell exactly once. Along the loop, every second cell where the loop makes no turn is marked with a circle.

Enjoy!

P465

P466

Puzzle No. 462, 463 : Double Skyscrapers, Crazy Pavement

In Bangalore right now to conduct the Bengaluru Brain Games’ Sudoku and Puzzle events in about 2 hours time. Quickly making this post before leaving.

These are more of the WPC practice. Crazy Pavement is easy without much going on. Double Skyscrapers has the non-symmetric circle because I forgot the converse rule when I created it for practice. It is solvable without that and without the converse rule, unfortunately.

Rules (as in WPC IB) –

For 462 (Serbian Snacks, Round 7) – Enter a digit from 1 to 6 (1 to 5 in the example) into each cell so that each row and column contains each number exactly once. Each digit in the grid represents the height of a building and the clues on the outside of the grid indicate how many buildings can be “seen” when looking from that direction. Taller buildings block smaller ones from being seen. In addition, digits in cells in the outer grid with a circle provide similar Skyscrapers clues for the inner grid for a horizontal or vertical (but not diagonal) direction. All such cells are marked with a circle.

For 463 (Dutch Delight, Round 4) – Paint some cells in the grid so that for each region either all its cells are painted or none at all. Numbers outside the grid indicate the number of painted cells in that row/column.

Enjoy!

P462

P463

Puzzle No. 454, 455 : Odd-Even Tapa

Few more puzzles that were part of WPC practice.

Rules – Follow regular Tapa rules. Instead of normal numerical clues, all odd digits are replaced by “O” and all even digits are replaced by “E”. (E cannot be 0)

Rated – Around the Easy/Medium mark for both. 

Enjoy!

P454

P455

Puzzle No. 444-447 : Puzzles from the Visa Application office

In addition to my usual puzzle related activities, I have been managing Team India’s visa application submissions. This has been quite a tough process. As part of the process, I have to stand in queue outside the office for 4 and a half hours, and then sit inside for about an hour more. The puzzles below were part of 9 I wrote when sitting in the office. I was obviously exhausted, and this was more of a “oh, I found a pen and paper, lemme just have a little fun to pass the time” kind of activity. Also, with a pen, I couldn’t erase stuff which makes construction infinitely harder, at least for me. So out of the 9, only 2 ended up working when I reproduced them on the computer. 2 others had easy fixes. The other 5 will have to be discarded as I can’t see what I can do to make them work. This hopefully makes up for my inactivity on this as well as next Thursday. Other than the league post on Tuesday, my next post will be a week after this.

Of the 4 puzzles that made the cut, 3 are Tapa related. This is fitting, as the TVC and CTC are nearing their end. I feel fairly certain of a top 10 finish in CTC, and hopefully somewhere thereabouts in TVC too. Generally happy with how I’ve done this year. The 3 puzzles below have a nice mix of a Classic Tapa, a variant that appeared this year, and a variant from the past. The 4th puzzle is a Shakashaka, which is nothing special.

In other news, the “Around the world in 80 Puzzles” Instruction booklet is out! As announced on this blog before, one of the 4 sets is written by me. I’d like to thank Amit Sowani, for test solving each puzzle and providing some good inputs along the way. I thank Ravi Kumar too, for coming up with the name Indian Intrigue which I liked the most out of the possible names. It was a pleasure working with Zoltan Nemeth and the other Hungarian team members too.

Anyway, puzzles!

P444 : Tapa. Rules for Tapa.

Rated : Medium (could be hard).

P445 : Twopa. If both grids are considered together using the following rule, they will each have a unique solution. In each solution, every clue must behave at least a little bit differently. This means, in a multi-digit clue, some of the digits can have the same behavior, but not all.

Rated : Medium.

P446 : Tapa Trimino. Follow regular Tapa rules (above). Additionally, the wall should only be made up of “L” shaped triminoes without overlapping.

Rated : Hard.

P447 : Shakashaka. Rules for Shakashaka.

Rated : Easy. 

P444

P445

P446

P447

Puzzle No. 436, 437 : Fillomino, Tapa

As promised, here’s 2 puzzles to make up for missing out on Sunday. The Fillomino’s just something I made to explore the middle pattern. The Tapa is one of those that was meant for elsewhere, but the theme was pretty nice so I decided to move it here. Its got my favorite (symmetric clues have same sums) theme, while all symmetric clues are still different. Its also got a decent un-clued space in the middle.

P436 –

Rules for Fillomino.

Rated – Medium (easy side).

P437 –

Rules for Tapa.

Rated – Easy.

Enjoy!

P436

P437

 

Puzzle No. 427 : Quadruple Sudoku [Daily League]

Update : Rating’s probably a bit off based on timings.

Remember that you can solve the puzzles from the League online on the Sudokucup Guest League page with a 24h delay.

Tapa Variations XIII is over. I took the slower/accurate route, mainly because I was too tired to speed solve. In the end, that actually worked out well, as I ended up 4th.

The Sudoku below is probably easy. No fancy tricks, but I still like it. I’m trying to go more into Sudoku-like Sudoku variants recently, if that makes sense.

Rules – Follow regular Sudoku rules. Additionally,  each set of four small numbers in the intersection of four adjacent cells indicate the numbers that are in the four adjacent cells.

Rated – Easy.

Enjoy!

P427

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

IPC Preview – Practice, Solving Tips, Links

Update: Fixed the typo in Pentomino Kakuro. New PDF uploaded. No other change.

Update: There is an erratum published on the IPC site that says the 2×2 restriction applies to Happy Dots too. Since the practice puzzle in the PDF still gives a nice practice for placing the dots and forming regions, and only uses 2×2 regions minimally, it stays the same in the PDF. We’re sorry for the inconvenience. 

If you’re having trouble with some puzzles, seeing/adding to the discussion in the comments might help. (This also serves as a spoiler alert for those who want to work on the puzzles without help)

Right, took a while, but we’re finally there. If you’re still not aware, the Indian Puzzle Championship will be held on 7th July. Here are our (me and Swaroop) best efforts, with the main goal being to try to help the newer participants.

This PDF features –

1. Practice puzzles for B1, B2, C, D, E2, F1, F2, G2, I1, I2, J1, J2, K1, K2, L1, L2, M2.

2. Beginner-level solving tips for all the puzzles in the set.

3. Solutions to all the puzzles in the set.

4.  Links to other practice material, pattern guides, and other technical tips.

Link to PDF – Practice

Enjoy!