bakpao's puzzles

The rail pools were some of my favorite puzzles in WPC, so I felt like writing another one for myself. I wasn't going to go for the empty middle initially but the original clue layout I chose made it almost resolve uniquely already, so I tweaked it a bit until it worked out. Difficulty: 3/5 (rules from Puzzle Rules ) Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centers of all cells. Clues represent the different lengths of the straight line segments that are at least partially contained within the region. Each number within a region must be represented by at least one line segment. Play on pzprxs https://pzprxs.vercel.app/p?railpool/10/10/m123n124w12t145s23zy34zk12p123qcd8l0k0o1g3050l2m6bqk5o3000000o3k5bq

I participated in WSPC for the first time last week!  Having entered the competitive solving scene somewhere late 2020/early 2021, this moment finally became a reality after almost 2 years of living up to it . I now look back at one of the most wonderful weeks I've had in a long time, where especially meeting people I'd been looking forward to meeting for so long and getting to make many new friends were  the most memorable parts for me. I got 56th in sudoku and 42nd in puzzles. Lower than expected in sudoku, much higher than expected in puzzles. I suppose it makes sense, as my preparation was very heavily focused on puzzles. I was on the B team for both events because of a poor performance in the Dutch championships earlier this year, but managed to get 3rd NL in sudoku (beating 2 A team members) and 2nd in puzzles (beating all members except Bram, who was miles ahead of all of us). A couple of really silly mistakes cost me a couple spots in the overall leaderboard, but lookin

  It feels challenging to construct a balanced puzzle in this genre. I wanted a break-in without using trivial clues and a solve that didn't fall apart right afterwards, while maintaining a double clues theme all the way around the edge. The puzzle went through a lot of iterations, but ultimately I think it came out quite nice. Fun fact - many different values work in the center to give the puzzle a unique solution. I also like how 9 resolves, but felt the 5 was more suitable. Difficulty: 3/5 (rules from Puzzle Rules ) Shade some cells so that all areas of orthogonally connected shaded cells are rectangular and all areas of orthogonally connected unshaded cells are not rectangular. A clue represents the size of its group of shaded/unshaded cells. Play on pzprxs https://pzprxs.vercel.app/p?cbanana/11/11/g33k44g4h33g66h44o4g4m6h4m6l5l6m4h6m4g5o65h44g44h6g55k44g

Just a small and fun little chained block that I wrote last night because I couldn't sleep. The layout, the almost full symmetry, it all came together quite nicely in this one. Difficulty: 2.5/5 (rules from  Puzzle Rules ) Shade some cells such that each connected group of shaded cells contains exactly one clue. Clues must be shaded, and indicate the size of their group of shaded cells. Each group of shaded cells must be connected by a corner to at least one other, forming networks. Two shaded groups belonging to the same network may not have the same shape and size, counting rotations and reflections as the same. Play on pzprxs  https://pzprxs.vercel.app/p?chainedb/9/9/3m3j4k4k4r2i3r2k2k4j5m5