Puzzle No. 514-516: Tapa, Tapa [Palindrome], Tapa

I got a bit late when it comes to keeping my alternate day schedule so here are 3 puzzles to make up for it.

Only the last one is “fresh”. The first one is a bit silly but also probably nice, I was experimenting with an idea, some people on discord have seen it already. The second one, the variant, is from a speedsetting contest quite a while ago. We had an hour to construct a Palindrome variant. This one took me about 35 minutes if I recall correctly. The third one is just a vanilla Tapa.

Tapa Rules: Shade some empty cells to create a single connected wall. Numbers in a cell indicate the length of consecutive shaded blocks in the neighboring cells. If there is more than one number in a cell, then there must be at least one unshaded cell between the shaded cell groups. Cells with numbers cannot be shaded, and the shaded cells cannot form a 2×2 square anywhere in the grid.

Palindrome variant additional rules: There are one or more palindrome lines drawn in the grid. The pattern of shaded and unshaded squares will be the same when read from either end of a line.

Links to solve each one:

Puzzle 514 – https://git.io/JR6hN

Puzzle 515 – https://git.io/JR6hH

Puzzle 516 – https://git.io/JR6hj

Puzzle 514:

Puzzle 515:

Puzzle 516:

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Puzzle No. 512: Kurotto

Since I’ve just been back here recently, I should note that sometimes, I won’t be posting “fresh” puzzles. Mostly this is because I also want to use the blog to organize some of these puzzles better.

I have been participating in “speedsetting” contests lately over on the CTC discord server. I’ve seen that this may seem unappealing to some more experienced puzzlemakers, but honestly, its a lot of fun. Also, mostly it allows me to put together something without overthinking about “where will it get published” and “what are the requirements”, while being in a limited time setting that makes me “feel” like I am doing something different.

What about the quality of the puzzle then? I’ll let you be the judge, with today’s puzzle, which is from a speedsetting event that took place just 6 or 7 hours ago. The constraints given were to construct a Kurotto with the only clues being in sets of 3 orthogonally connected cells, of the same shape (allowing for rotations and reflections). Basically, either a puzzle with only L trimino sets of clues or a puzzle with only I trimino sets of clues. The time given was 40 minutes but I forgot about it and joined late. Fortunately, its Kurotto, probably as comfortable for me as Tapa, so I could whip this up in 5-6 minutes. It won 2nd place!

I have more puzzles from earlier speedsetting contests that I’ll be posting in the future, but for now, here is the Kurotto!

Rules: Shade some cells so that each circled number represents the total count of shaded cells in connected groups sharing an edge with that number. Cells with circles cannot be shaded.

Link to solve on Penpa: https://git.io/JRqze