#54 - Kurotto Kingdom - Bonus puzzle pack and solution videos

Kurotto Kingdom has come to an end!

A huge thank you to everyone who participated in the contest! Whether you solved just a few of the puzzles, fought your way through all of them or woke up in the middle of the night to rack up those earlybird points, I appreciate everyone that found time in their daily schedules to solve my puzzles. I hope you all enjoyed the puzzles and learned a bit (or a lot) about Kurotto in the process.

My congratulations to IHNN / Jeffrey Bardon for winning the event, PuzzleMaestro / Freddie Hand for getting second place and EKBM / Ken Endo for taking home third place. Absolutely stellar performances.

The past 3 weeks for me were filled with replay upon replay upon replay. Watching you all solve the puzzles I wrote and reading your feedback has been an incredibly exciting experience, as well as one which taught me a lot. Seeing solvers find my exact intended path through puzzles was an absolute joy, but it certainly was just as, if not more interesting to see all the other ways found through the puzzles, sometimes much more efficient, sometimes much less.

Organising this contest, while definitely very intense, has been an exceptionally fun and rewarding experience. I couldn't have made it happen on my own - my gratitude goes out to Prasanna, Swaroop and Deb for assisting with all backend related matters, and to Stef and Philipp for testing the puzzles. And lastly, once again, thank you to all of you for your participation and your kind words!

Solution videos to all Kurotto Kingdom main contest puzzles:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFA3D_RRTH2QaULHXetTDHGEe7iYhRSV8

Now, as for the bonus content...
I was always planning to set a couple of extra puzzles besides the required 16 for the contest. This would give me more opportunity to pick the right puzzle for the right day, to create a contest with a wide variety of logic and good blend of difficulty levels. I set 20 puzzles initially, which meant 4 would inevitably not make the cut. Another 2 completely new puzzles were written while the contest was ongoing, to better match the difficulty progression up to that point, so a total of 6 puzzles ended up not being used. 5 of these are posted here. These were selected to be dropped from the rotation after seeing test solves of the puzzles, and solving them again myself some two months after setting them, for reasons varying from "too technical" and "too many uniqueness shortcuts" to "doesn't fit anywhere in the cycle". That said, just because they didn't secure a place in the main event, they're still puzzles I'm proud of and will gladly publish on this space. Do note that they generally solve quite differently to the puzzles you solved in the contest, often a bit less elegant.

As for the variant puzzles - after finishing the contest portion, I felt very comfortable with kurotto. All original puzzles were written over a 3 week period, a relatively short timeframe, and setting so many puzzles with so much logical variety meant I was pretty full of ideas at the time. I thought it would be nice to set some variants and hybrids too, to release along with the bonus classic puzzles. Some of them are common variants in the kurotto space, others less so or perhaps even new. The difficulty isn't very high for any of them, but these are definitely ideas I'd like to explore further in the future.

That said, I hope you will these bonus puzzles as much as the actual contest puzzles. I'd love to hear what you think of them, feel free to let me know!
~~And if after solving these you're still hungry for more, there's always the big boy over on this page left to tackle.... ;)~~

Rules for the bonus puzzles
(also included in the penpa link for all puzzles)

In all puzzles, classic Kurotto rules apply:
Shade some cells so that clues represent the total size of the orthogonally connected areas of shaded cells that share an edge with the clue. Clued cells cannot be shaded.

Windows: There are two windows in the grid. The cells in the same position in these windows must have opposite shading.

Connections: All circles that share a shaded group with at least one other circle are given in gray.

Palindrome: The Xth cell from one direction of a line and the Xth cell from the other direction of that line must both be shaded or both be unshaded.

Tapa: Uncircled clues represent the lengths of the blocks of consecutive shaded cells in the (up to) eight cells surrounding the clue. Clued cells cannot be shaded. There is no restriction on 2x2s.

Shimaguni: Shade a single group of orthogonally connected cells in each region. Shaded groups may not share a bold border. Each region must contain at least one shaded cell, and no two adjacent regions may contain the same number of shaded cells. When two regions border a kurotto clue, but not each other, they are allowed to contain the same amount of shaded cells.

Simple Loop: Draw a single non-branching, non-intersecting loop through all unshaded cells, including clue cells. (Answer check only checks for the loop in this puzzle)

Links and difficulty - Classic
(note difficulty here is an estimate measured on a scale ranging from the easiest and most difficult puzzle to have appeared in Kurotto Kingdom)
Crosshair - 3/5 - https://tinyurl.com/kefa4jfb
Consecutive Blocks - 3/5 - https://tinyurl.com/mryyz4uu
The Wall - 4/5 - https://tinyurl.com/2s8zc7h7
Ascension - 4/5 - https://tinyurl.com/y4fv444x
Dress Rehearsal - 4.5/5 - https://tinyurl.com/mvrv454r

Links and difficulty - Hybrid/Variant
Kurotto (Windows) - 2.5/5 - https://tinyurl.com/5ranszez
Kurotto (Connections) - 2/5 - https://tinyurl.com/3b6pvpuz
Kurotto (Palindrome) - 3/5 - https://tinyurl.com/466cuzww
Kurotto (Tapa) - 3/5 - https://tinyurl.com/376a76ud
Kurotto / Shimaguni - 3/5 - https://tinyurl.com/48tmb555
Kurotto / Simple Loop - 3.5/5 - https://tinyurl.com/2p8md5tk

Download all bonus puzzles as a PDF here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1idAPVyCG8i2_r-RrcQA-NRKYpbyjMMDJ/view?usp=sharing

Crosshair
This puzzle felt a bit too technical, which is fine, however it isn't really my preferred setting style and I didn't want too many technical puzzles in the rotation.

Consecutive Blocks
Not really any particular reason I didn't go with this one - I guess I didn't like the solve as much as the other puzzles.

The Wall
This one was heavily driven by the theme - a wall of 1 to 6 separated by empty clues, as well as only odd / even groups. It has quite a technical break-in and a massive uniqueness shortcut, which ultimately led to me deciding against it.

Ascension
This was scheduled to be puzzle 14 for a very long time. In fact, it was scheduled to go live at 10.30am my time, however I woke up that day at 8.30, solved the puzzle for what must have been the 100th time and decided I wanted something else. The theme for this one is really nice, however the solve felt a bit unbalanced and I didn't really like the resolution in certain areas of the grid. I decided to try and set a completely new puzzle (the 14x14 which ended up appearing in the contest), finished it 30 minutes before it went live, hastily test solved a couple of times and did all the back-end stuff to set up the puzzle. Definitely a risk, but I'm delighted I took it - that puzzle ended up being one of my favorites (and going off the ratings, one of yours too).

Dress Rehearsal
This was originally intended to be the before-last puzzle, with the finale being an 18x18 puzzle (I've chosen not to release that one as it is visually and logically very similar to the finale puzzle used in the contest). While reviewing the puzzles, a few months after I set them, I found 18x18 to be slightly too large to be the final puzzle. 16x16 felt like a better fit, however I didn't like this puzzle for a finale - while it has some very nice logic, it doesn't solve very smoothly (due to its difficulty), which was most important for me for the final puzzle. Also, it has a couple of spots I felt were a bit too inelegant, and overall the puzzle doesn't have any theming nor that nice 'closing out' feeling, whereas I feel the eventual final puzzle did check both those boxes. I do think that, seeing the progression of the contest over time, this puzzle would have been reworked into something much easier no matter what, had it appeared.