#96 - 2x Balance Loop (Inequality), 2x Shakashaka

All the way back in October 2022, at WSPC in Krakow, Murat and I had the idea to organise an online contest with a special theme, meant to make solvers do a double take while solving: All puzzles were to be doppelgangers, or puzzles with a similar twist (such as expanding the grid without altering the clues, or inversing clues, like the puzzles below). 

Besides the very strict theming, all the puzzles also needed to be fit for a contest and span a suitable difficulty range. Ultimately this lead to many failed attempts and many many hours spent on trying to get pairs of puzzles right.

We managed to get to 12 finished puzzles for the contest before we lost the motivation to spend more time on it. We've been sitting on the puzzles ever since, waiting for inspiration to strike again one day, but unfortunately it never did and recently we decided to therefore abandon the project. A shame, but the positive is I get to showcase some of the puzzles I wrote for it here instead. 

Revisiting the puzzles (which were all set about one and a half years ago), some of mine are below the quality standard of what I would publish nowadays, so I'm not publishing all of them.

Perhaps we will revisit the idea of hosting a contest in the future, but with less strict theming. For now, I hope you enjoy the puzzles!

Balance Loop (Inequality)
Difficulty: 3.5/5 for both

(rules from Puzzle Rules)
Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centers of some cells that passes through every circle. The straight line segments coming out of a white circle must have equal length, while the straight line segments coming out of a black circle must have different lengths. The sum of the lengths of these two line segments must satisfy the inequality in the circle, if given.

Puzzle 1: https://tinyurl.com/2yz9czsz



Shakashaka
Difficulty: 3.5/5 for the first, 3/5 for the second

(rules from Puzzle Rules)
Shade a right triangle in some empty cells, each of which occupies exactly half the cell it’s in. Each unshaded area must be rectangular in shape. A number in a cell represents how many of the (up to) four cells orthogonally adjacent to the clue contain triangles.

Puzzle 1: https://puzz.link/p?shakashaka/9/9/ic.nc.bschehcs3.hcl.hcg




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