#103 - IPC 2024 puzzle collection

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 path. I quite like how this puzzle came out.

#2 - Balance Loop (Optimizer) - Round 2 - 35/500 points - Solve on Penpa

The Logical Optimizer round, while interesting, was extremely challenging from an author's point of view, and I ended up submitting only one puzzle to it. It took 3 attempts to get to a puzzle I liked, with the 1st one being too hard and the 2nd one not even making it to testing submission as I didn't like it enough. 

The problem for me was that the puzzles in this round all felt very vibes-heavy and forcing a logical path in them was difficult without first cutting off certain areas of the grid (so that the optimization deductions there would be independent from other areas of the grid). This is particularly evident in the rejected puzzle, included at the end of this post.

#3 - Nanro (Nonconsecutive) - Round 3 - 35/700 points - Solve on Penpa

We were tasked with combining variants typically used for sudoku with other puzzle types in this round. This is always fun to do, but it can be tricky to come up with an interesting combination that works well. Initially I went with Nanro (XV) which worked fine, but felt too much like a one-off/gimmick to me to really like it enough. I eventually landed on Nonconsecutive instead and liked it much better.

#4 - Square Jam (Inequality) - Round 3 - 25/700 points - Solve on Penpa

Not entirely uncommon in contests (at least the ones I've been a part of), towards the end we were quite low on Region Division puzzles. I wrote two puzzles and submitted them as filler for the round if needed, leaving the spots for other authors if they wanted them. Eventually we decided to include both puzzles. This one is a fairly straightforward combination, and the puzzle pretty much wrote itself.

#5 - Pentominous (Thermo) - Round 3 - 50/700 points - Solve on Penpa

This was much less natural than the previous combination, but it sounded interesting enough in my head to give it a shot. I was well aware of the danger of the puzzle becoming extremely tedious with both memorizing/cycling through the pentominoes in alphabetical order and then also having to check many cases to rule out pentominoes, so I made the decision pretty early on to include givens on the thermometers. 

Leftovers/Rejects:

Square Jam (Inequality) - Difficulty 2/5 - Solve on Penpa

Nanro (XV) - Difficulty 2.5/5 - Solve on Penpa

Balance Loop (Optimizer) - Difficulty 4/5 - Solve on Penpa