bakpao's puzzles

WSPC 2024 has concluded! I made the trip to Beijing, China to compete for the 3rd time in a row, this time on the B team in both events following my absence at the Dutch championships this year (to take part in 24HPC instead).  I finished in 54th unofficial in WSC (3rd NL and down from 38th unofficial last year) and 38th unofficial in WPC (3rd NL and up from 47th unofficial last year).  I cannot be happy with my WSC performance - I lost 175 points  alone  to puzzles where I forgot to resolve the last two cells. That means a bit of careful checking at the end of each round would have been enough to jump me to 34th place and 1st NL. Perhaps with some more preparation in the days leading up to WSC (where instead I was enjoying long, active days sightseeing around Beijing), some of the many broken puzzles could have been avoided too and who knows, my result might actually have been good. Oh well. There's always next year.  I am quite happy with my WPC performance t...

Another year, another contribution to the Indian Puzzle Championship! This marks my 4th year in a row contributing to this event. I contributed 5 puzzles this year, which can be found in this post,  along with some rejects and leftovers . Like last year this post only contains the puzzles I wrote for the contest. The full IPC set can be purchased for a small price which helps LMI cover the costs incurred to organize the live event and continue to organize them in the future.  The full set contains all puzzle rounds, full of high quality puzzles, as well as bonus content like the PR Playoff puzzles and a giant interconnected puzzle gift. If you are able to, do consider purchasing the set. More information available  here  (IPC) and  here  (ISC) . Rules are included in the Penpa links, otherwise please refer to  Puzzle Rules . #1 - Star Battle - Round 1 - 30/500 points - Solve on  Penpa Mostly going for a clean theme and a not too difficult solve pa...

I was writing a Wafusuma for a project I'm contributing to and while doing so got the idea to try this set-up. It's a little gimmicky and I didn't put too much effort into it (this was the first location I tried for the rectangles - I did have to tweak the values though) but I think it turned out cute enough to publish it. There's probably a mean counting puzzle hiding in a different version of this idea as well. Difficulty - 2.5/5 (rules from Puzzle Rules ) Divide the grid into regions of orthogonally connected cells. Two regions of the same size may not share an edge. Borders must separate two different regions. A number on a border indicates the total number of cells contained in the two regions it separates. Solve on puzz.link https://puzz.link/p?wafusuma/10/10/u78g.h.h78m69m7am99p.i.zo.i886m475zs.iab95la976u

After supplying a round to the  offline portion of this year's UK championships , I was also invited to author some puzzles for the online event. This took place a while back, but I never got around to uploading the puzzles - here they are! I supplied five puzzles this time, of which three are in the first round and the other two in the second.  Be sure to also check out the other puzzles here (round 1) and here (round 2) . The puzzles are all good fun! Rues are included in the penpa links for all the puzzles. Enjoy! Round 1 Puzzle 1 - Balance Loop - 26/470 points https://tinyurl.com/2xq37x8s I mostly went for a striking visual theme in this one. A consequence of the lay-out I chose was that the break-in was a bit hard to find - some solvers had trouble getting started. It should be mostly smooth sailing after finding the correct entry point. Puzzle 2 - Araf - 36/470 points https://tinyurl.com/23wfee55 Not really any theme - this was a last minute addition to have some more R...

Last week, the GAPP project in the CTC server reached its 1000th day. To celebrate, the authors (myself included) collaborated on a large shading mashup, which was very positively received by many of our solvers. Feel free to check out the puzzle here , if you are in the CTC discord. Since my 100 blog entries milestone was also coming up, and I never ended up writing a big puzzle when I reached 1000 puzzles authored, I decided to write another puzzle on the same grid we used for GAPP1K, with the same genres and (mostly the same) rules, but without the difficulty cap. I expected the puzzle to take longer to finish, but it seems I got into a groove, and here it is!  Overall I'm very happy with it - I managed to preserve symmetry in all grids except the Half Piece one (where it really wasn't working out no matter what I tried) and built in lots of cool interactions between the various genres.  This puzzle is a fair bit more difficult and narrow than the GAPP one, so if you want t...