bakpao's puzzles

I felt randomly inspired to write a Tapa / LITS puzzle, one of my favorite hybrid combinations. Difficulty: 3/5 (Base rules from  Puzzle Rules ) Normal Tapa and LITS rules apply. Clues cannot be shaded.  No 2x2 region may be entirely shaded. Tapa: Shade some cells so that all shaded cells form one orthogonally connected area. Clues cannot be shaded, and represent the lengths of the blocks of consecutive shaded cells in the (up to) eight cells surrounding the clue.  LITS: Shade one tetromino of cells in each region so that all shaded cells form one orthogonally connected area. Two tetrominoes of the same shape may not share a bold border, counting rotations and reflections as the same. No 2x2 region may be entirely shaded. Play on penpa https://tinyurl.com/2g3w87lr

Over in the CTC discord server  we run a daily pencil puzzle project called Genuinely Approachable Pencil Puzzles. We started this project in 2021 as a follow-up to the extremely popular Genuinely Approachable Sudoku project and haven't missed a day since. It features a daily puzzle that is almost always on the easy side, to introduce novice solvers to all kinds different genres and variants. The puzzles always come with a small example (included here) and time benchmarks to target for (not included here). While I'm not part of the core author team, I tend to cover for main authors when they are absent for any period of time, whether it's a day, a few months or anything in between.  This post showcases, from newest to oldest, the puzzles I've written for GAPP. Difficulty for GAPP puzzles is all between 1/5 - 2/5. Below the GAPP entries are my contributions to  Mind The GAPP. This is a compilation PDF we release monthly, featuring all that month's puzzles but also ma

 Now that Twitter links are no longer being picked up by the puzz.link scraper, I suppose I'll be posting all my puzzles here for the time being. If anything, it's a good excuse to bring some more life to this blog. Classic Chained Block - nothing too tricky but hopefully fun. 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 puzz.link https://puzz.link/p?chainedb/11/11/2t8j4i6j5i2j3zg4zg7j2i5j3i4j2t4

Last weekend the 20th edition of the 24 hour puzzle championship in Budapest took place!  I participated for the first time and had an absolute blast. I went in fully expecting to fall asleep halfway through as I can rarely stay awake for 24 hours on end, let alone while solving puzzles. Surprisingly, staying awake wasn't the hard part - there were some rounds in the middle of the night where I would occasionally doze off for a few seconds while stuck in a puzzle, but actively solving puzzles actually was a great distraction to keep my mind off the fact I wasn't sleeping. And while fatigue is definitely a factor, there also comes a point where you just get over it, and the last few rounds were actually some of my best.  Much more troublesome was the physical pain endured from sitting at a desk and holding a pencil all that time - at some point everything just starts hurting. In the end though, I managed to stay awake (and active) the whole time, and ended up in 18th place out o