#104 - WSPC 2024 recap and practice puzzle set
WSPC 2024 has concluded!
I made the trip to Beijing, China to compete for the 3rd time in a row, this time on the B team in both events following my absence at the Dutch championships this year (to take part in 24HPC instead).
I finished in 54th unofficial in WSC (3rd NL and down from 38th unofficial last year) and 38th unofficial in WPC (3rd NL and up from 47th unofficial last year).
I cannot be happy with my WSC performance - I lost 175 points alone to puzzles where I forgot to resolve the last two cells. That means a bit of careful checking at the end of each round would have been enough to jump me to 34th place and 1st NL. Perhaps with some more preparation in the days leading up to WSC (where instead I was enjoying long, active days sightseeing around Beijing), some of the many broken puzzles could have been avoided too and who knows, my result might actually have been good. Oh well. There's always next year.
I am quite happy with my WPC performance though! Sure, there's still loads of room to do better, but my ranking is still improving year on year and the preparation I put in definitely paid off, which is great to see.
A short breakdown follows of my performance per round for each event, along with what I liked and/or didn't like about the events as a whole and some other afterthoughts.
If you're just here for the practice puzzles, scroll to the bottom of the page.
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WSC
Round 1 - Along the River During the Qingming Festival: 260/400 points (tied for 22nd unofficial)
A decent start for me this year, as I managed to solve all but the Weiqi (75) and Consecutive On-Line (65). I was about 10-20 seconds short of finishing the latter, which made me think I did poorly at the time, but the result was fine. The puzzles were great and the round had nice theming - a good sign for what was still to come.
Favorite puzzle: Consecutive On-Line, even if I just missed out on finishing the last classic bits.
Round 2 - A Wide Expanse of Flat Land: 100/150 points (tied 35th)
This was a 15 minute classic round. I am not a fan of rounds this short. I had only barely sat down and the round was already over. The skill ceiling is high enough that a handful of solvers can actually finish, but for me (and I think most other people) this round just wasn't it. I'd much rather see more time and either more puzzles or more finishers. I managed to do 6 of the 8 classics, leaving the two 25-pointers.
Round 3 - Classic of Mountains and Rivers: 170/400 points (39th)
My first disappointing round, scoring less than half of the points. I broke the Odd (25) at the beginning of the round, but didn't immediately see how to fix it so I decided to revisit it at the end of the round. When I did, I somehow thought it was the Extra Regions that I broke instead, and tried fixing the Odd as an ER. Needless to say, that didn't work out, especially considering the two contiguous regions of odd cells in the puzzle were only 8 and 7 cells large respectively. In retrospect, I think my confusion must have come from the fact that both puzzles use "17" theming with grey cells. Other than that I sank most of my time into the Blackout (60) and Anti-Knight (50), which both took way longer than they should have (according to the points values at least).
Favorite puzzle: Renban
Round 4 - Perfect Match: 115/500 points (tied 85th)
Another sad result. The Star Battle Passage (80) broke on me at the very end and I couldn't fix it. I still have no idea where it went wrong. The Blackout Skyscraper (70) also broke halfway through. Between those two puzzles, that was almost half of the round gone. I managed to solve the Pointing Arrow (40), No-Touch Windoku (75) and Sum Next to Nine Renban (65) in the remaining time, but failed to disambiguate the last two digits in the latter, leading to the first disastrous result of the event. There would be a few more to come...
Favorite puzzle: Sum Next to Nine Renban, even if I didn't get the points
Round 5 - Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art: 235/400 points (tied 17th)
Somehow the math round ended up being my best individual result. I think more than anything that shows how badly my other rounds went. I wasted a bit of time restarting the Killer (30) in this one - had everything gone well I might have scored 50 more points from the Ratio, of which I finished about half before time ran out.
Favorite puzzle: Positional X-Sums
The Arrow sudoku had some unexpected arrow shapes that made for an interesting puzzle
Round 6 - Double-Ring Pendant: 0/150 points (:sweat_smile:)
Oops. Bad preparation from my side - I didn't know this round had partial scoring. About 5-7 minutes in I realized I wasn't going to finish (this was another 15 minute round), so I pretty much just gave up. I had a few correct digits filled in, but didn't indicate which grid I wanted graded and so I ended up scoring 0 points. The concept of this round was nice, but the short time limit again wasn't it for me. Effectively, the entire round came down to "see this one trick quickly and you'll score well, don't see it and you're getting a bad result". That's fine for an individual puzzle, but not an entire round.
Round 7 - Face Changing in Sichuan Opera: 115/450 points (tied 92nd)
Another very poor result. I solved 3 puzzles just fine: Unmarked Thermo (30), Outside Sequence (45) and Arrow-or-Thermo (40), and then wasted over 20 mintues on the Yin-Yang (50) without being able to solve it. I should have moved on sooner, as I was a few minutes short of finishing the Large-or-Sum (85) instead, which would have salvaged my round.
Favorite puzzle: Arrow-or-Thermo - smooth to solve and pretty to look at
Round 8 - Hopscotch (Team): 575/1200 points (15th)
There was so much criticism for the physical aspect of this round ahead of the event. It ended up being perfectly fine (at least for me and my team, as well as most people I spoke to afterwards) and fun. My problem with the round was that it wasn't much of a team round at all - we were only solving individually with no communication allowed, and we did all puzzle selection in advance. I ended up solving 6 puzzles for 225 of our points total. We beat our A team by 5 points!
Round 9 - Chang'An City (Team): 330/1200 points (tied 30th)
Ah yes, the Sudo-Kurve round. None of my team members were particularly good at this type, myself included, so we were off to a very slow start and spent the majority of the round correcting errors. At the end we guessed a few boxes with only some ambiguous digits remaining which slightly improved our score, but overall this was a pretty poor showing. I liked the round concept and look forward to solving the puzzle again casually by myself though.
Round 10 - Hard Roads Toward Shu: 125/300 points (tied 52nd)
This was the hard classic round, capped at 30 minutes. If this round has shown me anything, it's that I need to practice paper solving more. I had an error in one puzzle, costing me 25 points, but even with those points my result would have been pretty poor and certainly much worse than what I would achieve on a digital interface.
Round 11 - Complete Library of the Four Treasuries: 350/1000 points (tied 72nd)
2 puzzles in this round with unresolved digits at the end, costing me 110 points and 27 places in the round ranking. The biggest time sink for me was the Blackout 2-Sums (85), which I restarted fully from an avoidable error, meaning I spent probably upwards of 20 minutes securing those points. This was probably my favorite round of the entire tournament, just because it was the only round that was long.
Favorite puzzle: Citywalk, it had some fun connectivity logic (which you don't get to use in WSC often)
Round 12 - Interlocked Stratagems (Team): 780/1200 points (tied 13th)
Even though the mechanism linking the puzzles together in this round was quite simple, this was a lot of fun as a team round because it required constant collaboration between solvers. We ended up doing alright, not getting near finishing the round but doing well enough to beat our A team (by 51 points this time). That was pure luck though, as my teammate completely guessed about 15 digits in the Skyscrapers towards the end and got all of them correct!
Round 13 - Hundred Schools of Thought (Team): 1240/1200 points (tied 5th)
Looks like we saved our best performance for last! It's amusing that everyone was super worried about the Hopscotch round, yet it was the sticker element in this round that was the more troublesome and demanding physical challenge of the tournament. I managed to find a good strategy for peeling them off, and was pasting them on at a pace about 6 times as fast as my teammates. Less amusing was the fact that teams that did not fully stick their stickers on the bamboo sheets but just lied them on top at the end still got full score, whereas teams that finished (including us) didn't get to call finished until all stickers were successfully stuck on the bamboo sheet. We would have had 5-7 more minutes of time bonus if we didn't have to peel the stickers. The concept of the round itself was great though and offered a nicely varied end to the tournament.
Closing thoughts:
- I've been mostly been highlighting my poor performance in the rounds recap, so first things first: The quality of the puzzles in general was really good. Almost all of the puzzles had great logic, a smooth solve path, pretty design and theming, or a combination of any of those elements.
- I do wish there were more longer rounds and no rounds shorter than 30 minutes. 15 minutes is just too short, regardless of how many puzzles are in the round and how easy/difficult they are. Longer rounds are always nicer for me, as they give opportunity to get into a good solving flow but also, on a more abstract note, give me much more of a proper championship feeling.
- I did feel like in general the medium pointers were slightly undervalued. The 30-50 pointers almost all took me about 2-3 minutes longer than they should have. Of course, that could easily as well be a skill issue, but I think most people I spoke to about it agreed.
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WPC
Round 1 - Welcome: 190/350 points (tied 8th unofficial)
A top 10 start? I'll take it! The tournament opened with a 35-point Midloop that felt much harder than 35 points, so I was a bit worried when I looked at the clock and saw 6 minutes had already passed. I still ended up doing very well though, mostly because I managed to solve the tough as nails 90-point Balance Loop. I guess loop-heavy rounds still favor me.
Favorite puzzle: Country Road, as it felt most fitting for a welcome round - not too large, not too hard, but still quite clever
Round 2 - Classic Dozen: 140/400 points (tied 58th)
Going in, I was optimistic I would do very well in this round, but oh boy was I wrong. Part of it was on me - something went wrong in my Slitherlink (45) solve and instead of just erasing, I wasted a large amount of time tweaking. Slightly rattled, I decided to go for some easy pointers instead to try to get into a good flow. I started with the 15-point Akari and didn't see what to do halfway through. I guessed wrong and moved on, deciding it wasn't worth putting in more effort for minimal points. I tried the 15-point Shikaku instead and got absolutely nowhere. I guessed again, twice on the full grid this time, got it wrong both times and lost trust in the low-pointers being actual easy puzzles. On the other hand, I solved the relatively high-point Kakuro (60) just fine in what felt like less than 6 minutes.
In post-solving, the Akari had one tricky step that I missed during the round that at least made it fair (but for me would bump it up to at least 25-30 points). The Shikaku on the other hand appears to have no logic. Solving it logically took over 20 minutes and countless deep bashes. I can't help but wonder how a puzzle like that makes it into a championship, and how it gets this severely undervalued.
Favorite puzzle: Tapa. The logic around the edges was cool
Round 3 - Miscellaneous: 255/450 points (tied 18th)
A decent recovery after last round's fiasco. I practiced a few Pyramid Climbers ahead of the event and was really grateful I did, because without the practice I wouldn't have gone for the 85-point one in the round, while now I ended up securing the points without too much effort. Aside from a hiccup in the Yajilin (40) where I overlooked a shaded cell tucked between some clues on the edge and thought my puzzle was broken, this round mostly went alright for me. In post-solving the Battleships took me over half an hour and I wasn't able to find good logic, so I'm glad I passed on that during the round.
Favorite Puzzle: Aqre. It had a nice break-in and some cool steps afterwards
Round 4 - Puzzle Chain: 275/500 points (tied 25th)
Another decent performance for me, although I regret not going for more number placement (I left Japanese Sums (120) and One to X (75) during the round). In particular, I breezed through the One to X in post-solving - I'm fairly certain the Double Choco (25) and Double or Nothing (35) both took longer to solve. Nice theme to the round.
Favorite puzzle: One to X - another nice break-in!
Round 5 - Elemental Cycles: 65/400 points (tied 92nd)
Ouch - that's my worst performance so far. It came down to poor strategizing on my part. I felt like I had to go for a high-pointer to do well in this round. I opted for Laser (85), a type I haven't solved at all beyond two practice puzzles in the week before the event, instead of Statue Park (75), a type I'm reasonably comfortable with. I did not manage to solve the Laser even after wasting over 20 minutes on it, while the Statue Park had a findable break-in and a fair solve path that I expect I would have been able to get during the round. In retrospect even the U-Bahn (65) and Tents (50), both types that I'm not very good at, would have been better choices, with both puzzles being much easier than expected.
Favorite puzzle: Anglers - it had fun topology
Round 6 - Solar Terms: 355/1050 points (tied 63rd)
4 mistakes in this round, of which two were just failing to complete the puzzle. Oof. Without the mistakes I would have landed in 32nd place with 535 points, though I probably still wouldn't have been happy, as I spent at least 15-20 minutes on the 45-point Sashigane. It felt like it should have been worth well over 100 points. In the end I missed drawing one line, so frustratingly I ended up with 0 points for my efforts. I also restarted the 105-point Icebarn twice, losing valuable time. The Worms (10) was another example of a seemingly out of place puzzle - it felt quite hard to solve logically and seems to be designed as a vibes-only puzzle, but the solution to me feels very counterintuitive. How this lands on 10 points, I have no idea. I'm just glad I didn't waste too much time on it during the round. All of that said, I did like that this round was longer and most of the puzzles were nice and enjoyable. I quite liked the Fillomino Splitter (95) though not attempting it during the round was a good call - it took me around an hour to solve (admittedly on zero energy on the flight home).
Favorite puzzle: LITS (Splitter) - fun genre to give the Permaculture treatment
Round 7: Duality: 195/600 points (tied 54th)
I liked the concept of this round reading about it in advance, but in practice keeping all the rulesets of especially the fairly uncommon genres separate added a lot of complexity for me. The Kropki Pairs (75) proved to be my enemy, with two full restarts and 3 breaks at the exact same place at the end, meaning 0 points earned. Of course, during post-solving everything went fine and I still have no idea where my errors came from.
Favorite puzzle: Consecutive Quads, surprisingly - it had a neat trick
Round 8: Eleven Years Later: 350/600 points (tied 20th)
Now we're getting into the rounds I prepared heavily for with my practice puzzles. I did well in this round, which I knew I would about halfway through after securing the 105-point Thermometers. The puzzles I wrote practice puzzles for, Vista (50) and Spiral Galaxies (Double) (20), were both fairly easy grabs too. I enjoyed this round a lot more than I thought I would - I tend to not like older styles as much and some types like Triangle Snake are a bit silly, but I had fun with almost all of the puzzles both during the round and while post-solving. From this round/day two onwards the points values seemed to be more balanced as well, which made me enjoy the rounds more in general as well.
Favorite puzzle: Pipes (the trick was expected but still well done) and Corridors (a bit intimidating at first glance, but a very enjoyable solve)
Round 9: Variants: 230/600 points (tied 47th)
I solved 8 of the 12 puzzles in this round but left both high-pointers (and lost 25 points to a small error), so my result was never going to be great. I probably should have gone for at least one of them - they both were fine during post-solving and I quite enjoyed the Statue Park (Hitori) (105). The Nurikabe (Araf) (20) felt like another undervalued, tweak-heavy vibes puzzle and for Skyscrapers (Deficit) (45) I have no idea what the logic for the ending is, but everything else was fun in this round.
Favorite puzzle: Hashi (Projective Plane) - intimidating at first, but really not that scary and actually very fun
Round 10 - Irregular: 275/600 points (tied 25th)
I definitely wouldn't call myself an expert on the funky grid shapes in this round, but I am reasonably familiar with them so I was feeling alright about this round. I'm disappointed to have errored on the Koburin (55), especially as that puzzle took forever because I kept reading the grid wrongly. I enjoyed all the puzzles in this round, although the Sudoku grid definitely gave me a headache for a while.
Favorite puzzle: Chocolate Banana (Tetrakis Square) - this genre/grid combination is simply too good
Round 11 - Little Happiness: 133/200 points (22nd)
Sprint round! Surprisingly, I didn't mind the short time limit (20m) here as much as I did in the short rounds in WSC. Maybe because these were all tiny puzzles. I ended up solving 29 out of 40. The biggest stall for me was the Line of Sight, which ended up not being unique. A shame, but it can happen. I quite enjoyed the change of pace the round offered. The 1/2/3/4 theming was very cute.
Favorite puzzle: Symmetry Area - it packed a nice little punch for such a small grid
Round 12 - Quadruple Happiness: 380/650 points (tied 18th)
I didn't really know what to expect from this round, but I usually enjoy hybrids and the practice puzzles I did before the event were all quite interesting, so I was hopeful for a fun round. That turned out right - the puzzles were all great and I prepared enough that keeping rulesets apart was not an issue this time around. I was proud to solve the 3 loop puzzles in exactly 17 minutes (they were worth 175 points), the rest ended up taking a fair bit longer.
Favorite puzzle: I particularly enjoyed Yajisan-Kazusan + Context + Kurodoko + Aquapelago, but the loop puzzles were great too
Round 13 - Secret Symmetry: 265/600 points (tied 27th)
My first impression when I read the IB for this round was "wow, that's an amazing concept, but I wonder if it wouldn't be better suited for a team round". I think I still stand by that - while I enjoyed the round a lot, I would have even more if it were a team round. I was scared going in that it might become a 0 point round for me, but I ended up doing reasonably well, solving the Aquarium, Regional Yajilin, Four Winds and Scrabble. I thought my Four Winds would be wrong because I marked the wrong symmetry on my helper sheet, but my solution was thankfully still correct. It would have messed me up later on, but I never got that far.
Round 14 - Brain Power: 95/1000 points (tied 77th)
I was not looking forward to this round - too many types I have no idea how to solve and usually skip without even looking at them. Naturally I started with the Word Search (35), which ended up only taking around 2 minutes. After that I managed to score a few points on Old Maid (30) and Alphabet Blocks (30) in decent time. Then it went downhill fast. The remainder of the round I spent mostly on Maze Collector (80) but not managing to get anything out of it (despite also guessing a few times), and the Jigsaw Puzzle (105), which I thought was going smoothly until I read that not all pieces had to be used.
Favorite puzzle: Give me a round full of Word Searches already!
Team Round A - Chinese Knot: 2875/4000 points (tied 6th)
This was easily my favorite team round - Loop mashups are just so satisfying to solve and the mechanism used to link the puzzles together in this one was great. I very much look forward to re-solving this round by myself casually in the future. We did pretty well, beating many A teams including the Dutch one. We had an avoidable error and lost a few 50/50s at the end, but all in all we were very pleased with this result.
Team Round B - Octahedron: 2275/5600 points (tied 11th)
We didn't do as well in the shading team round, probably because we tried for way too long to solve individual grids and didn't do much matching of the grids for the first half hour. Still, we solved half of the grids and ended up doing a lot better than our A team. They unfortunately had many errors spread across different sections of the puzzles, racking up many penalties. A nice bonus for us was that we completely guessed the large region in the Nurikabe towards the end and got it fully correct. Overall this round was great fun too, even if our matching strategy was mostly "go with the first thing that works without eliminating other options methodically".
Team Round C - Reunion: 1300/4800 points (25th)
For the Region Division round, we were our own worst enemy. We didn't use the transparent sheets to overlay the regions from the Countries puzzle onto other puzzles because for some reason we thought they weren't allowed in stage 2. As a result, we spent an unnecessarily large amount of time trying to find the correct position for the eliminated regions in all of the stage 2 puzzles, and didn't solve many of them at all. We never made it to stage 3. While the concept was great and the individual puzzles were all very good and enjoyable, we felt overall the round was a bit too long/the time limit too short to fully appreciate and enjoy everything it had to offer.
Team Round D - Marathon: 1005/5600 points (15th)
This round was great! The incremental points values in combination with not being allowed to go back to previous sets added a nice strategic element and it was a great way to use leftover puzzles. We didn't get to see the last set during the round, though just from looking at the puzzles after the round was over I can't really say that I mind. We still had a ton of fun ending our tournament with low to medium pointers and the round had a nice mix of teamwork and individual solving. We didn't score particularly well, but that didn't matter much to us anymore.
Closing thoughts:
- Let me start off by saying that it was great to be part of this WPC and overall I enjoyed the experience a lot. There were many fantastic puzzles that I enjoyed solving both during the rounds and casually afterwards, and the quality of puzzles and design of the rounds was mostly great. There were many new types to enjoy, but old and obscure types were also given the spotlight plenty of times. The tournament had interesting variants, cool hybrids and other fascinating new concepts.
- It was however a real shame the points values were so off for many puzzles, particularly in the earlier rounds. Because of it, I mostly look back at those puzzles with negative feelings, even though they weren't necessarily bad or unenjoyable. Quite the contrary - from post-solving, I'd say most of them were perfectly fine puzzles. Not being able to trust the points values had large consequences for my strategy though. As the contest progressed, I was more looking at what puzzles looked reasonable to attempt and less likely to have wrong a points value, rather than following my predefined strategy to optimize my points. My threshold to give up on or hopelessly start bashing a puzzle when I didn't immediately see what to do also became much lower, which can't have been good for my performance.
- I also wasn't a fan of the low-pointer puzzles that seemingly have no (fair) logical path, of which there were a handful. I definitely don't mind guessing, but I don't expect to have to fully bash a low-pointer and it often just ended up messing up my flow and leaving me with a sour aftertaste. I'm sure my neighbour also didn't appreciate my endless erasing!
- This WPC saw a repeat of last year in that all the team rounds were after the individual rounds. Last year it was by necessity, this year it was by design. I hope we don't see that again - having one or two team rounds at the end of the day is a nice way to cool down after an intense day of solving, as these tend to be a bit more laid back (at least for us). I also can't imagine what it must have been like for the playoff participants, who had to go straight from solving team rounds all day to playoffs without a meaningful break in between.
- To end things on a positive note, the team rounds themselves were all fantastic! I enjoyed them more than previous WPCs I have been a part of, and I'd be glad to do any one of them again.
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That's all for the main events! While there were definitely things that could have been better, I very much enjoyed being part of both events again and am glad I made the trip out to China. Thank you to all the organizers, authors, judges, volunteers and anyone else involved for putting on two great events. There's plenty of stuff left to talk about still though!
First off, Crystal Ball! After my victory last year, expectations were high to perform well once again. I put quite a bit of thought into my answers and what do you know - I won again! I definitely wasn't expecting it though - it became evident as the tournament progressed that quite a few of my answers were just plain wrong. Thankfully, everyone else suffered the same fate, as clearly shown by question 11, which was answered correctly by exactly 0 participants. I also featured as the tiebreaker again (guess my unofficial rank in WPC), and I guessed 39th. I finished in 38th. Amusingly, 38th was also my guess, my official WPC rank and my unofficial WSC rank last year. If anyone needs inspiration for what to guess next year, there you go.
In other news, I am now the newest member of the WPF board! The thought of running for board hadn't crossed my mind at all, but I was nominated/asked if I'd be interested at the beginning of the week. I wasn't immediately sure I wanted to, but after thinking about it for a few days I decided to go for it, and I got elected during the GA for a 3 year term. At the time of writing I'm not entirely sure what I'll be focusing on nor do I have a clear vision yet of what I would like to achieve, but I'm confident I'll be able to make many contributions during my tenure. I'm an active member of the puzzling community as both a solver and author, have over 3 years of experience (co-)running a large puzzling discord server, help several organizations out behind the scenes a lot already (including WCPN, LMI, WPF) and in general am highly enthusiastic and passionate about this community and would love to help it grow further. I look forward to serving my time on the board!
And finally, some random afterthoughts about the week as a whole:
- The coffee machine outside the competition hall was a godsend. I don't remember who told me, but someone said it wasn't actually from the hotel but brought in by someone from the organization team. If that is true, whoever brought it in, thank you!
- It was a bit disappointing there were no side events/evening programs. The karaoke I think was impromptu as well. Perhaps I should've hosted another speed-setting session, like we did last year?
- Did anyone else have a room full of stinkbugs? The first night, I caught no less than 8 of them in my room! Also, I don't think I've ever slept on a bed that hard before in my life. My back is still sore!
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Lastly, here are my practice puzzles for this year. I spent less time on each individual puzzle than I usually do, to at least get a chance to look at every genre I wanted to. As a result I don't think any of the puzzles are particularly great/refined. The one exception is the Vista - that one came out really nicely and I'm very happy with it. Rules are not included in all of the links, in case they are missing, you can find them in the IB.
Round 9 - Nurimisaki (Domino) - https://tinyurl.com/29yuf8to
Round 9 - Maxi Loop (Mini) - https://tinyurl.com/25stbl4z
Round 8 - Vista - https://tinyurl.com/2b4akryb
Round 10 - Yajisan-Kazusan (Triangular) - https://tinyurl.com/ywlvxztz
Round 10 - Slant (Deltoidal-Trihexagonal) - https://tinyurl.com/ysu2kg5g
Note: For answer check, draw each line individually (e.g. do not resolve multiple cells with a single mouse click)
Round 8 - Spiral Galaxies (Double) - https://tinyurl.com/yps7z9wu
Round 9 - Skyscrapers (Deficit) https://tinyurl.com/ywvvhd2n
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