Also, hello to everyone looking at this from the database; I redesigned the site!
]]>This was the puzzle I created for Secret Solver 2022 on the Puzzlers’ Club Discord server. Nowhere near as big a puzzle as my last go-round but I’m happy with it nonetheless. I’ve been quite busy, and not really had the time to dedicate to puzzles.
I procrastinated a lot on getting this up on my site, to the point I decided to rewrite the entire site first. Also, major thanks to chimpaznee for the gift I received!
]]>When I originally posted this, Statue Park was a puzzle that only actually existed on pzprxs by X-Sheep; however, it’s now in the main puzz.link branch. Things got very hectic at work and I ended up with a lot less time for puzzles. But now I have at least a little more time and decided to make a Statue Park.
]]>Those of you with topology knowledge might recognize this as being secretly based on the real projective plane. The puzzle was created for a Logic Showcase on the Puzzlers Club Discord server with a theme of portals; thanks to phenomist who ran it and had the detailed rules use the word “involution”, inspiring my puzzle idea. While it ended up on the bottom half of the entries that were submitted in terms of votes, it did recieve many notlikeduck reactions (Psyduck with his signature headache) when it was posted, which is a win of its own kind.
]]>As you can see, it has a theme. I had been busy and in a bit of a slump recently, but when I saw what number was next, it inspired me.
]]>Arguably a revisit of my second puzzle here but a bit more principled, since I know what I’m doing construction-wise a little bit more.
Also, there’s a tiny part of me that wants to write this one as if I were a certain Homestuck character…
]]>I do like the way that big clues in this variant block off areas all on their own. It provides an interesting set of issues.
Thanks to IHNN for finding uniqueness and solution issues in the first versions of this Tapa.
]]>Each quadrant is a puzzle of the dynasty (named for Smullyanic Dynasty, and described as “No Adjacent, No Divide” on puzz.link) variety, with the standard rules for that genre. As well, for each coordinate in each puzzle (i.e. every Row 4, Column 6), exactly one of the puzzles has a shaded cell, with the exception of the one cell for which all four cells are marked with a cross, which should remain unshaded in all four grids.
Dots are only for location purposes.
Detailed genre rules:
Also, I should warn you: this is a very difficult puzzle, and I’d recommend you learn river theory; if you speak English, I suggest Teal’s guide, and if you speak Japanese, these two blog posts.
And finally, massive thanks to IHNN for test-solving this puzzle, and to athin for my own gift.
]]>I worried that Dynasty Quartet, the big puzzle I made, might not be personalized enough, so I fixed that problem by making the most blatant form of personalization in a much easier puzzle: it spells out my solver’s name.
]]>I tried to make it have the same clue pattern as my Cave but had to add two more at the end.
]]>The name comes from the center kind of looking like a fidget spinner of 3s and a 5.
]]>Note in particular that unlike my last Masyu, this puzzle is not antisymmetric, so solving the Masyu half is different than solving the Ura-Masyu half. It’s an amusing coincidence that puzzle 22 is also a Masyu (though not solvable as Ura-Masyu).
]]>This failed so much the first time I tried to make it that I almost worried the genre was literally impossible to construct, but then realized that was very unlikely, made a loop satisfying the condition, went back to the clue pattern of my first attempt, and constructed this…almost. You might be able to tell where I had to sacrifice for the sake of uniqueness.
]]>Hmm, uniqueness logic with 2 in the corner is a pain as a constructor, isn’t it?
]]>This was a surprisingly difficult puzzle to make unique, but I think I was able to preserve most of the main argument I came up with.
]]>Here’s a 7×50 Gokigen-naname. Have fun!
]]>Thanks to Freddie Hand for checking uniqueness.
]]>Someone on the Puzzlers’ Club server suggested I make a Haisu, so I did. Thanks to Dave Millar for checking uniqueness on a type that is easy to make non-unique (and not supported by the otherwise quite useful SDVX logic puzzle solver).
]]>I definitely thought this up in the Bachelor Seal style, after David Altizio did it, though I think it didn’t quite end up the same.
]]>Cave is a nice genre, and I really like some of the deductions I was able to get into this one.
]]>The idea came to me after seeing Jonah Ostroff, who has made quite a few isometric puzzles, make a joke about a certain “uniqueness deduction” in Dominosa. It’s an interesting mathematical question as to which reasonable hexagon sizes can be used with full sets, and a surprisingly human-solvable one to figure out which sizes of regular hexagon would work with a “standard” triangular-number domino set.
I do think 3×3×2 and the 1-6 domino set might be a bit small for this puzzle type because this shape means that deductions can trigger a lot of other deductions, but this one is nice as an example if nothing else.
]]>I woke up, decided I wanted to make an anti-symmetric Masyu puzzle, and I did. Constraints are fun.
]]>While the puzz.link database was watching, Will created forty puzzles. That’s as many as four tens. And that’s… pretty great, actually.
This one was deliberately made to match the number, unlike the last two times.
]]>I think this is the first region division puzzle I’ve made, in fact. Sashigane is an interesting genre, but it took me a while to even understand the rules at all, especially solely from the puzz.link example rules; this video definitely helped me understand.
Also I think this might be the second time that I made a puzzle with a numerical theme matching the puzzle index without even meaning to.
]]>It’s taken me a while to really warm up to Creek as a genre. The unbalanced way shaded and unshaded cells can be determined makes for a very strange solve at first. The similarity of the presentation to Gokigen-naname, a genre I cottoned to much faster, didn’t help either. But I think this construction definitely shows off a fun thing to do with Creek.
]]>This is a super interesting type to construct and solve. Thanks Joseph Howard for help in making puzzles in this genre!
]]>Sometimes it’s nice to just throw clues down using pzprRT. And Simple Loop works nice with that as long as you do it in pairs.
]]>2⁵ puzzles. I’m pretty impressed with myself for sticking to it even this long, even if it’s a bit on-and-off. Thanks to TheGreatEscaper (creator of Haisu) for catching a uniqueness error in the first version of this puzzle.
]]>Another pzprRT. I’ve been tired/busy lately and haven’t truly handmade any puzzles recently, without the solver. That makes me feel kind of bad.
]]>Because I put so many cells in this, it’s actually a penalty Heyawake (known in Japanese, if I remember correctly, as へやわけMAX/“Heyawake MAX”) and amenable to a solution with that.
And like my other recent Heyawakes, this is made with pzprRT.
]]>This was made with pzprRT again, and I think it has a really nice theme to it.
]]>I used a bit of a “slant pun” as the title because the more direct pun already got used by Galactic Puzzle Hunt.
]]>It’s an interesting genre. I like the way you have certain combinations of square numbers to add. Also, if you’re making a hunt puzzle, you have now until I make another puzzle to index based on my puzzles 😊
]]>I think it’s the first puzzle I’ve made in a genre created by my one-time coworker Palmer Mebane. Interestingly, I didn’t really get into logic puzzles until well after I was no longer at that job (though I did enjoy apps like “Flow Free”).
]]>Thanks to Jonah Ostroff for finding a uniqueness error in the first version of this puzzle. Topological puzzles are definitely tough to ensure uniqueness of.
]]>The first place I showed this, I did this joke in pretty much the opposite direction, and one person wished they hadn’t seen that bit as it’s a bit of a hint to the puzzle itself, so I decided to do it in a way that is hopefully a little less obvious.
]]>My 20th puzzle! Has some similarities to some of the GMPuzzles this week but hopefully the execution makes it worth its while.
]]>I tried to have a more symmetric (if maybe not completely symmetric) clue arrangement, but all my attempts kept failing; either it would be impossible to connect the ocean, or the islands would be ambiguous with no good way to fix them. The 12 feels like kind of a dirty way to get a unique puzzle, but it worked.
]]>I think this is the first vanilla Tapa puzzle I’ve made, using the suggestion from elsewhere that I make the pattern of givens first and then decide where they lie. It’s definitely a very versatile genre.
]]>The solution is something I might post later, but not on this exact post right now, because it’s a very neat one (if possibly quicker to bifurcate than to properly solve) though the title gives a very big hint.
]]>Today (the day I posted this, if I did it correctly) is my birthday. You might be able to guess how old I turned. As a puzzle, this is probably tricky to prove unique (if not solve at all) without a particular formula described by Ivan Koswara in the instruction booklet for his 25 Years contest; with it, it should significantly simplify your search for a solution (and your proof of uniqueness).
]]>I think it’s a pretty clever one, and working with central symmetry led to some decent aesthetics in the clue pattern, I think. I sort of had antisymmetry in mind, and it shows in some of the clue patterns, but I generally sacrificed it for the sake of the solve.
]]>Haisu is a really neat genre and I’d love to be better at constructing topological genres of puzzles. The room arrangement here produces a nice set of arguments, I think.
]]>By shading cells, draw a single snake in the grid that does not intersect itself, even at a corner. The snake must begin and end at the black circles (represented with the impossible-to-satisfy “8” clue in the puzz.link version), and may not pass through the numerical clues. Numerical clues are interpreted as in Tapa: they represent the lengths of the blocks of consecutive shaded cells in the (up to) eight cells surrounding the clue.
This puzzle was entered into a Puzzle Showcase on the Puzzlers Club Discord server; it was not one of the top 5 entries, which doesn’t surprise me too much. The person who streamed all of the puzzles in the showcase enjoyed it as a refreshing break from the extremely difficult ones, though.
]]>Thanks to IHNN for testing this puzzle and finding an ambiguity in the earliest version of this puzzle.
]]>Draw a slanted line in each dotted-line square.
The red and blue lines in the Penpa link and below image are connected as in the standard presentation of the torus, as one might infer from the repeated numbers on each edge.
Treating those numbers on the corresponding location of a line as the same number and adding up the lines entering them, the number of lines entering each circled number should be exactly that number.
The rule forbidding loops has to be relaxed:
If the puzzle is tessellated along the red and blue lines (as in a tiled wallpaper, or the “parallel universes” of Super Mario 64), it should contain no loops.
Equivalently, if you’re familiar with topology, there should be no loops that are trivial in the sense of the fundamental group.
Equivalently, there should be no loop separating the inside and outside.
Furthermore, an image describing allowed versus disallowed loops has been attached to the page, below the image post.
This puzzle was entered into a Logic Showcase on the Puzzlers Club Discord server; it got a tie for 5th place (described by the organizer as “5th and 6th place” with a single vote score), which is a pretty solid result given that there were over 20 entries!
There are two links on which you can play; the penpa link has a proper answer check, but as the “diagonal” line interface can be less intuitive than that of the puzz.link Slant player, I also provide a link to the latter.
]]>Thanks to Tiralmo on the Puzzlers Club Discord for helping me find an ambiguity in the earliest version of this puzzle.
]]>