Also, hello to everyone looking at this from the database; I redesigned the site!

• The path that the loop makes must not contract to a point; equivalently, it must cross the colored lines that are glued in the cross-cap an odd number of times.

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.

• Despite the visible puzzle grid being half a cube (in part due to penpa limitations), the grid for this puzzle is in fact a full six-sided cube; however, every single cell is connected via portal to its antipode (if the cube is centered around the origin, its antipode would have negative coordinates from the original cell).
• A cell must be shaded if and only if its antipode/portaled cell is not; furthermore, all clues on the visible sides of the cube are reproduced with color inverted on their antipodes, consistent with the portal rule.

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:

• In all four genres:
  • No two shaded cells may be orthogonally adjacent
  • The unshaded cells must form a single orthogonally connected area.
• Heyawake:
  • Numbered regions must contain the indicated amount of shaded cells.
  • A line of consecutive unshaded cells may not cross more than one bold border.
• Yajisan-Kazusan:
  • If a cell with a number in it is unshaded, the number represents how many shaded cells are in a straight line in the indicated direction.
  • If a cell with a number in it is shaded, the number is meaningless, and its clue may be satisfied or unsatisfied.
• Star Battle but shading:
  • Exactly two cells should be shaded in each row, column, and region. No two shaded cells may be adjacent diagonally.
• Kurodoko:
  • Clues cannot be shaded, and represent the total number of unshaded cells that can be seen in a straight line vertically or horizontally, including itself.

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.