It lies!
Follow regular Masyu rules. In each row and column exactly one clue is false. Once proved false, a clue can behave as anything except what it’s supposed to be (including remaining loop-less).
Rated – Medium.
Enjoy!
P477
I confess, I totally forgot about my own blog schedule, and got this one out in a real hurry. As a result, its turned out really hard. I’ll keep it that way, even if it might border on guesswork. There’s a pattern to be found though, and using symmetry and some visualization, progress can be made, and after that, its fairly easy to finish up (since the pattern’s pretty big, that’s not surprising).
Rated – Hard.
Enjoy!
P434
Tomorrow is the National finals of the Times Sudoku Championship. The top 4 from each city can be seen here. Its gonna be nice to meet and compete against the other Sudoku enthusiasts of the country, with many new faces qualifying this time.
Today’s puzzle is a return to my favourite 13×13 size. Difficulty wise though, its easy enough. Its just got a few spots that push it to medium.
Rated – Medium-ish.
Enjoy!
P419
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
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
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
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
Daily League Week 4 Updates –
Friday – Diagonal Sudoku by Tom.
Saturday – Little Killer Diagonal Sudoku, Stefan’s first contribution to the league.
Also, Week 3 PDF.
Ok, so today’s puzzle. I’m still working on multiple sets, so these are gonna be the scraps for now. Of course, later on in the year, when the respective tournaments are over, I’ll post most of these sets. But for now, the easy 10x10s or rejects are probably the best I can do. This one’s an easy 10×10.
Anyway, for today’s, follow regular Masyu rules. Additionally, the cells the loop does not pass through need to be orthogonally connected till they reach an edge of the grid (So its like a Corral, kinda. Hence the name).
Enjoy!
P283
On a lot of fronts, its been a horrible start to the New Year for me so far. However, one good thing stands out right now, and that is the start of “Champion Sudoku”. Basically, me and my fellow bloggers Rishi Puri, Tom Collyer, Fred Stalder, Seungjae Kwak , etc. (the list is growing but these are the 5 authors confirmed this week so far) have planned a series of Sudoku variants that will be released in a PDF at the week’s end. If you are interested in joining in with this project, either to solve along, or to contribute, or anything else, please get in touch, or else join our facebook group.
My turn was a Palindrome Sudoku that you see below. I find this one quite tricky and its been confirmed by most of the above top solvers as such. The Palindrome Masyu has a tricky bit in the middle too. So I’d rate both at a light hard maybe.
For 266 : Follow regular Sudoku rules. The numbers formed by the digits on the gray lines are palindromes, that is to say, they can be read equally in both directions.
For 267 : Follow regular Masyu rules, except that the circles aren’t given. Instead there are shaded areas. Every cell of these areas must contain a Masyu circle, black or white. Also, each distinct shaded area is a Palindrome, so a certain color circle on one end means the same color circle on the other end and so on.
Enjoy!
P266
P267
So… umm.. I hope someone’s pleased to see this. Anyway, TBH, he helped me more than the other way round as I was all over the place on what type I wanted to do today. So when I saw the comment, I just put this one together quickly, because, well, I’ve still got a lot on my plate (refer to yesterday’s pointless post). I hope it doesn’t disappoint.
On a side note, I think Country Roads with symmetric regions are very limiting in a lot of ways. But I can’t stop doing that, maybe because I like it, or maybe because I just feel lazy and this way I just need to copy-paste one half of the grid into the other and so save myself half the work. Whatever be the reason, it shall mostly continue. Because I like it.
On another side note, I recently got my 4th salary for providing puzzles for life-365. Which means I have earned about 2-3rd of the participation fee at Croatia just through this. Cool eh?
On yet another side note, this is the 400th puzzle I have ever created, since starting on December 23rd. And I make too many side notes.
Combine ’em. Solve ’em. Enjoy ’em.
Rated – A medium-hard level puzzle made in a state of immense anxiety(not related to the puzzle itself). I make too many medium level puzzles.
Puzzle No. 194
PS's puzzles + 