#110 - WSPC 2026 recap and practice puzzles
WSPC 2026 has concluded!
This was my 5th year in a row participating in WSPC. I was on the A team for both Sudoku and Puzzles this year.
I finished in 25th official in WSC (1st within NL, 30th unofficial, same official rank but down from 29th unofficial last year) and 22nd official in WPC (2nd within NL, 30th unofficial, up from 38th unofficial last year).
No terrible results by any means, but they both left me feeling like I could have done a lot better. Both tournaments were plagued by more unnecessary errors than usual, and during WPC I unfortunately was ill during the 2nd day.
I was very well prepared for WSC this year. I put in a lot of practice, even doing a mini bootcamp in China in the week leading up to the event, simulating many of the individual rounds. I think my result is disappointing to me mainly due to an extremely poor start on the first morning, and bad performance in the non-standard rounds (Samurai and Relay).
As for WPC, my preparation was a bit lacking, much like last year. As soon as the IB was out I read and solved it, fetched whatever practice puzzles I could find and wrote my own puzzles. I think after I finished that and went back to preparing for WSC, I waited too long before picking up WPC practice again. I didn't solve all the practice puzzles I collected, wasn't fully aware of all the rules until the day of the event and didn't pay nearly enough attention to the team rounds. My rank is still my best ever, but there was definitely potential to do even better.
That's not to say it was all negative - I managed to beat my best individual round rankings in both events (which was especially surprising for WPC, where I thought my performance on the full loop round last year would be hard to beat), finished a WSC classics round for the first time and our team performance in WSC is our best ever! Plenty of positives to draw from, and I also feel like the areas I need to improve on most to do better next year have never been more clear to me.
As always, up next is a short breakdown of my performance per round for each event, followed by what I liked and didn't like about the events and some other afterthoughts, and I will close out the post with my WPC practice puzzles.
If you're just here for the practice puzzles, scroll to the bottom of the page.
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WSC
Round 1 - Kuru Clan: 270/600 points (46th [O]fficial / 63rd [U]nofficial)
My worst start to a WSC since my debut in 2022. Most of my worries ahead of time were for the 120p Toroidal, but I surprisingly got through it without much trouble. The rest however... Disambiguation errors in both the 25p Classic and 45p Nonconsecutive, a broken 90p Killer and two other incomplete puzzles. Ouch. I don't usually suffer from slow starts like this, and I don't really know what went wrong this time.
Not something you ever want to see, especially not as your tournament opener (X is wrong, circled is solved, strikethrough is unattempted).
Round 2 - Pandu Putra: 170/350p (53 O / 78 U)
An even worse continuation. This was the Samurai round, which I was more than well prepared enough for and was expecting to do really well in, but it turned into disaster. It took long to find where to really get started (the centre was the last place I expected), I left two cells blank in the Creasing and I messed up both Clone grids without being able to fix them in time. Really disappointing, especially since I still looked to be just on finishing pace up until 5 minutes before the end.
Yep.. should have definitely caught those. (Creasing Sudoku)
Round 3 - Kauravas: 455/650p (15 O / 18 U)
The dreaded Hundred round. When I first saw the IB I expected this to be a big drop round for me. I would have absolutely signed for a 15th place result. I managed to do well largely thanks to having access to a lot of tough-as-nails practice puzzles. Even after all that practice, I still felt my top result would be to solve everything except the Inequality and the Skyscraper though, which is exactly what I did. I was really happy after the round, but was immediately brought back to earth when I learned one of my teammates did better than me. I thought that meant I must have done poorly, but no - I can only applaud his excellent 11th place, and I still feel proud of my own result as well.
Not going anywhere without my trusty cheat sheet this round. (Edge Difference Hundred Sudoku)
Round 4 - Acharya Drona: 255/350p (20 O / 22 U)
The Classic round is always one where I secretly hope to do exceptionally well. This year I came in with my most guess-heavy strategy to date, and it seemed to pay off - I finished with 1:27 left. I should have used those 27 seconds to check more thoroughly though, as I ended up having two errors. One error was a wrong disambiguation of two digits, the other was just a completely wrong guess that I failed to notice. Despite the initial disappointment, being able to finish a Classic round filled me with confidence for the rest of the tournament, especially after my disastrous first two rounds.
For some inexplicable reason I only checked the columns and boxes after guessing and failed to see the rows had errors.
The confidence would be short-lived, as I then unexpectedly completely fumbled this round. I did not solve anything in the first 20 minutes, first breaking the 60p Coded and then the 75p S for Sudoku. Errors can always happen, but it's rare for me to have this kind of start to a round. I panicked, not knowing what to do next. After taking a moment to calm myself down, with 20 minutes left on the clock I then at least managed to get the 30p Flame Path to regain some confidence, as well as the 70p Escape and finally with seconds to spare and shaking hands the 65p Five Still Alive.
After 4 disappointing rounds among the first 5 rounds of the tournaments, the pressure was on to start doing well. Thankfully the innovations round went better for me. I solved all except the 50p Attack the Leader (of which I decided the rules were too confusing for me to attempt during the round). An error in the 40p Trishula meant another slight drop, but I still ended within the top 10, so no complaints there. I liked having a full round of novel types, and thanks also to some excellent practice puzzles I finally had another round I was content with.
Round 7 - Pandavas in Disguise: 620/700p (7 O / 9 U)
Continuing my good performance, this round went extremely well for me. I solved all but the Ordered Distances and was clean in everything I solved. I ranked 7th, which is my best individual round WSC ranking to date. Most of the puzzles were a lot easier than I anticipated, which probably worked out in my favor.
Round 8 - Gandhari's Solidarity (Team): 1320/1200p (4 O/U)
In this team round we solved a 6x6 Classic blindfolded, using nothing but feel, communication and stickers. A unique yet bizarre experience. I said to my teammates at the end of the round "That was fun, but I never want to do it again". I definitely still stand by that. Our performance was great, finishing with a few minutes to spare, mostly thanks to my teammates who were much better at this than I was.
Round 9 - Draupadi's Swayamvara (Team): 675/800p (8 O / 12 U)
This round consisted of a Flower Sudoku surrounded by 5 Pentagram Sudokus, each with a different math variant. We also did good here, finishing with a few seconds to go, but unfortunately our Perfect Square Sudoku had an error and we lost 125 points. My individual performance again was a bit poor, messing up the Product Killer Sudoku. I still solved it after an almost full erase, but it certainly would have cost us some bonus had we been clean. This was a fun round with a lot of teamwork and some unusual grid shapes.
Round 10 - Dharma Yuddha: 685/800p (22 O / 26 U)
This was this year's long round, which tends to be one of my best rounds. Especially after my excellent round 7 and armed with good preparation for the types in this round, I was hopeful I could replicate my solid performance. I solved everything except the 40p Anti Clone and the 75p Maximin for a 22nd place. When the round ended, I felt like my performance was good enough for a top 15, but I guess I didn't quite do well enough. I had some mishaps on the Alternating Stripes (forgetting about the no repeat rule) and the Anti Clone (false break-in leading to a failed solve even after 10 minutes). Had I solved flawlessly a finish would have definitely been on the cards, but I'm not too unhappy. I enjoyed the visual theme in this round.
After breaking this puzzle once I used my correction tape on everything except my false break-in (the 285/825). Needless to say the 2nd attempt did not go much better. (Anti Clone Sudoku)
Round 11 - Arjuna's Revenge: 160/350p (60 O / 84 U)
After 3 solid rounds, this Relay round was another very poor showing for me. In this case I forgot about the individual points values, so after getting stuck on the 70p puzzle I shifted to solving from the back for the remainder of the round, but I should have stuck with the 70p puzzle and just tried a bit harder. Another empty cell in an otherwise completed grid meant another 30p dropped. This was my worst ranking across both WSC and WPC this year.
It happens at least once every year and it hurts every time.
Round 12 - Ashwatthama is Dead?: 440/400p (16 O / 19 U)
The last individual round, which came with some surprises in the form of irregular grids and constraints. Probably should have seen it coming, but admittedly I did not read up on the lore or theme much ahead of the event. This was my favorite round, mostly because the rest of the rounds all felt a bit the same and this offered a nice mix-up. I finished this round with 4 minutes left, which was good enough for a 16th place. My only small (but very typical) mishap was in the Inequality, where I wrote the given 1-9 diagonal in the wrong order in pen, but thankfully I caught it before my grid was broken beyond repair.
Disaster narrowly avoided along the main diagonal. (Inequality Sudoku)
Round 13 - Daanveer Karna (Team): 1400/1600p (5 O / 7 U)
In this round we were matching various negative constraints to a bunch of empty grids. We again finished with seconds to spare, but again also had a small error, I believe this time in the XV Sudoku. Another reasonably good performance though, securing a decent 5th. I liked this round a lot, mainly because rounds where teams can be clearly divided into some members mostly doing matching and others mostly doing solving are always my favorite.
Round 14 - The Game of Dice (Team): 1840/1800p (2 O/U)
Wow, a 2nd place finish! This round involved a lot of carry-over information through 3 individual puzzles per team member mapping onto different edges of a shared Classic grid. We finished with a minute to spare, so we were all happy but there was no way we were expecting to rank 2nd. After a quick glance around the room and several compliments from the volunteers we realised that a good result would be imminent if we were clean though, which we were. We figured out pretty early on that good teamwork on the Classic would be crucial to do well and as such we did not spend too long trying to break in to our own separate grids, which turned out to be the key. A really fun round with a lot of teamwork.
Round 15 - Chakravyuha (Team): 1280/1200p (6 O / 10 U)
The final team round involved rotating circular grids into the correct position. At this point we were all tired and we were less prepared for this round, so we felt scared going in but we were determined to give it our best and attempt to continue our streak of finishing all the team rounds. We managed with 2 minutes left. Not nearly as good as some other teams but we were still feeling more than happy, especially when we learned that we were the only team to finish all the team rounds. We ranked 6th in the round, and managed to secure 4th place overall - our best ever team WSC result! We were even dreaming of a podium finish for a brief moment after the round concluded, though it would have required Japan to have made an error, which didn't happen. In the end we were still all extremely proud of and happy with our achievement.
Some closing thoughts on WSC:
- Across the WSCs I have attended, this one felt by far the lowest difficulty to me. While that is mostly beneficial to me since I do much better on easier difficulty, it did make the whole WSC feel a bit monotone and less interesting to me than recent years. I would have liked a few more really hard puzzles and for the average difficulty to be slightly higher.
- Puzzle quality was great though, much as expected. No puzzles with unreasonable solve paths, great visual themes across the board, very well executed and interesting team rounds - pretty much nothing to complain about there.
- I did not like the playoff format. Solving on flipcharts is fine, but racing a single puzzle in a 1v1 format felt like too much of a coinflip. I feel like there should have at least been a few puzzles, or a structure similar to WPC where the entire field is competing against each other.
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WPC
Round 1 - Raghu Clan: 355/750 points (51 O / 77 U)
My first thought upon seeing the IB was "Oh god, why are we starting with the casual round?". That eventually changed to "I'm glad the casual round will be out of the way early on". I enjoyed opening with the 80p Word Search, clocking a nice 3.55m solve time. The rest of the round didn't go so well - I solved everything I wanted to, but my strategy pretty much avoided the high pointers. As a result my ranking is not very good, but at least it wasn't anything unexpected and I had no errors.
Favorite puzzle: It has to be the Word Search.
I did not expect my knowledge of archery was going to get tested during this competition. (Chronological Order)
Round 2 - Vishwamitra: 570/650 points (6 O / 8 U)
My result this round was excellent though! I knew I had a good chance of doing well, but I definitely did not expect a top 10 ranking. I even finished the round with seconds to spare, but I knew my 3rd Battleships was wrong and I ended up having another error in the 2nd Battleships. With a bit more luck this could have been a 4th place finish, but as it is it was still enough for my best ever individual round placement across both WSC and WPC, so I can't complain.
Favorite puzzle: I particularly enjoyed both the 2nd Fillomino and the 2nd Kakuro.
My distaste for all 1s Slitherlink got reaffirmed this competition when this puzzle had me fully erasing the grid after a minute or two right after the round began.
Round 3 - Sita: 240/400 points (28 O / 34 U)
The first round where I felt disappointed with my performance. I seemed on track to finish for a while, but couldn't manage to solve the Kurotto and stayed with it for too long. In post-solving I found the Yin Yang Link way easier despite being the same points value. I could and should have managed to get both, which would have been a great result.
Round 4 - Dasharatha's Dilemma: 290/400 points (26 O / 32 U)
I thought the concept of this round was cool. Striking a good balance is difficult though, and I think in practice the better choice was to always take the easier puzzle with more complex rules, even if I felt strong on the genre with the harder puzzle. I didn't always do that, deciding what I felt like solving more after looking at both puzzles for a few seconds and often choosing the harder one, which probably ended up costing me a good amount of points. I did have 60p more from the Summon, but my solution was wrongly marked correct so I gave the points back. Going for it in the first place was definitely a mistake - I spent at least 10 minutes on that puzzle, but flew through the paired Candy Crush in what felt like 2 or 3 during my post solve.
Favorite puzzle: The Transporter was cool and unusual.
Yep.. that's not 58. The tweak is not too hard, but I couldn't find it in time. (Summon)
Round 5 - Urmila: 410/450 points (11 O / 15 U)
I enjoyed this round a lot. I'm not sure I would call some of the genres unsung heroes, but it was an unusual collection of genres nonetheless. I finished the round with a few seconds to spare thanks largely to a very successful intuited Common Letters solve in the last two minutes, but unfortunately had an error in the 40p Catloop.
Favorite puzzle: It's Yours - I like the sneaky stuff that happened in it.
Round 6 - Agastya: 455/600 points (20 O / 30 U)
I felt well prepared for the innovation round, but my result was slightly disappointing. It would have been a fine 14th place finish if not for a very frustrating error (see below). As in WSC, I enjoyed having a round full of novel types, and there definitely were some really interesting genres among them that I hope will stick around for a while longer.
Favorite puzzle: Despite it throwing me for an enormous loop, I enjoyed the 2nd Urumi Spirals.
This cross could have so easily been avoided with an extra dot. Just... why? (Box and Blob)
Round 7 - Shoorpanakha: 465/1000 points (33 O / 44 U)
Permacultures scare me. I did not feel very confident going into this round and my less-than-half score shows it. Not too much to say about my performance other than that the Yin Yang gave me way more trouble than it should have. I liked most of the puzzles, though I probably would have enjoyed the round more if different genres got combined rather than just a genre with itself, at least in some of the puzzles.
Favorite puzzle: Rassi Silai was a very fun and smooth solve for me.
Round 8 - Bharata's Resolve (Team): 1121/1600 points (8 O / 10 U)
This was the Forest/Capital round. The Q&A for this round alone took what felt like forever, which wasn't a very promising sign. Unfortunately I don't think this was a very well executed or enjoyable round. My biggest issue is that there was a large puzzle which two members of every team would not even get a chance to see. Those two were just solving individual puzzles all round, in our case with minimal teamwork at that, so to them it felt like another individual round. As for all the other parts: the moving aspect for only one team member, the extra puzzles in the capital section - it was all a bit too much and too disconnected for me.
Round 9 - Janasthana: 360/600 points (21 O / 27 U)
This was the sprint round. I did not like the genre selection much, but that's just personal preference. The puzzles were fine - quick and fun. Boggle intimidated me too much during the round but ultimately proved fine during my post-solve, so a bit of a poor strategy here, but an okay result.
Round 10 - Laxman Rekha: 195/400 points (19 O / 25 U)
I was looking forward to this Loop mashup round. I felt prepared for it and thought I might be able to well. I did for most of the round, but then I got stuck not seeing a slightly more involved but very important deduction to really progress the solve in the top left, and ended up struggling to secure partial points in other areas that weren't necessarily meant to resolve yet for most of the round. A bit disappointing, but right after the round I was expecting my rank to be much worse, so I suppose in the end it was fine.
Round 11 - Shabri: 330/450 points (12 O / 14 U)
This round with selected genres from previous WPCs went slightly better than expected. I knew I wasn't going to get the Maximal Archipelago, but I wasn't feeling confident about Go, Knight Hidato and Gapped Skyscrapers either. Thankfully those all turned out to much easier than expected and I solved everything except the Maximal Archipelago. Well, I drew a random dynasty solution in the last minute or so, but of course that was never going to work.
Favorite puzzle: Quadruple Happiness
Round 12 - Hanuman: 125/300 points (47 O / 58 U)
Like in WSC, my result in the relay round proved extremely disappointing. I solved 5 of the 6 grids but only scored points for 3 - I forgot to disambiguate the final 2 stars in Star Battle and had an error in Golem Grad (which also prevented me from solving the final Mochikoro). I think both errors came from panicking at the end in a rush to try and finish.
As in WSC, so too does a forgotten disambiguation happen at least once in WPC every year.
Round 13 - Vali and Sugriva: 265/550 points (42 O / 54 U)
This was the Garland round. I liked the concept but in practice it was rather easy to tell which puzzle would need the extra clues without even solving anything most of the time. In part due to the inherent strengths and weaknesses of the paired genres, but also because every puzzle was a doppelganger. As a theme that was very impressive, but I don't think it made the round better in this case. Anyway, I probably should have double checked the rules. I forgot about the entire Garland shape not being allowed to overlap given elements rather than just the cells on the Garland that had clues in them. It ended up only costing me points in direct errors on the first puzzle, but it accounted for a lot more wasted time trying to figure out where the Garlands were supposed to go in other puzzles as well.
Favorite puzzle: Pentasight + Tetrasight, from post-solving. It was amusing how similar the solves were.
I still struggled to solve this even after placing the Garland. Turns out there was another rule I was forgetting about. Thankfully I caught this one in time.
Round 14 - Squirrel: 80/200 points (35 O / 51 U)
I think this was the first time I did a Just One Cell round competitively. I have mixed feelings. I liked the puzzles which had a more involved full-grid deduction, but disliked those with a local deduction and a lot of irrelevant obfuscation in the rest of the grid. Overall this concept also doesn't really suit my solving style, which is way too intuition and guess heavy to do well on a round like this.
Favorite puzzle: Retrograde Battleships, even though I very stupidly got it wrong.
Round 15 - Kumbhakarna: 760/1200 points (10 O / 14 U)
I was most looking forward to the marathon round. How could I not - after all it had a giant Word Search. I took about 5 minutes to secure partial points on it, but an unfortunate 15 minutes to fully solve it. The rest of the round went fine, though not going for the Multi Sum Skyscrapers was a strategic error. From post-solving it felt very overvalued to me, especially compared to the FiveCells, which took me much longer during the round. Still, a top 10 finish in the most valuable round? I'll take it.
Favorite puzzle: Rail Pool. It's sad that the puzzle had a small issue - the solve was lovely.
I could not find two words for the life of me and had to resort to methodically circling the first letters to find them. (Skip Word Search)
Round 16 - Vanaras Assemble (Team): 660/1200 points (8 O / 15 U)
This was the Deshon round, where every team member started with an individual set of puzzles and came together at the end to solve a giant region division puzzle. I took the 2nd hardest individual set, my teammates getting scared off by the high point Double Choco. I got through it without too much problem, and I enjoyed the variety the Deshon constraint brought. I then pretty much sat around doing nothing for the remainder of the round though, as the large puzzle was.. very much not for me. We ended up only getting one region right, so a pretty disappointing result, but one shared with many teams.
Round 17 - Search for Sita (Team): 1210/2000 points (7 O / 10 U)
This round flipped the structure from the previous round, with all team members starting at the same table and then making their way to individual sets of puzzles as the round progressed. I volunteered to take the hardest set this time. I first solved the coded Retsurin fine and felt good when I went to my set. Mukkonn Enn was fine. Kurodoko as well. With 20 minutes left for a hard Tetrasight and LITS Guard, I was feeling cautiously optimistic, but then disaster struck. I thought Tetrasight had an unshaded connectivity constraint and ended up breaking it over and over, erasing fully many times, and ultimately did not solve either puzzle. While I don't know if I would have gotten the LITS, I definitely should have gotten the 170p Tetrasight. There were more struggles within our team on other puzzles, so our result again was not what we were hoping for. I did like the round structure a lot though and hope we see it again.
Round 18 - Indrajit: 300/650 points (34 O / 48 U)
I was thankfully feeling better on day 3 after being ill on day 2. Despite my regained energy though, the last individual round, containing puzzles with Invisible elements, did not go so well. I was very well prepared for it, having written three practice puzzles and having solved a bunch more, but unfortunately messed up the Tapa twice and sank over 20 minutes on it without being able to solve it. A disappointing end to individual rounds, but I had long made my peace with this WPC not going to be my greatest ever showing.
Favorite puzzle: Invisible Mathrax. Definitely intimidating, but it turned out to be a fine and enjoyable solve.
The real reason I write practice puzzles is so I can give them to top contenders, observe them solving and then copy their notation style. This one proved quite helpful. (Invisible Yajilin)
Round 19 - Vibhishana (Team): 1280/1200 points (3 O/U)
This round saw all members of the team working on their own set of puzzles, each a different category of genres. Our result is fantastic, securing a tied third place. It certainly didn't feel like we were solving on that kind of pace during the round, but I guess we did better than we thought! I found this round very enjoyable - a simple concept, good puzzles and more than enough ability to help teammates that got stuck on their own sets.
Round 20 - Bridge to Lanka (Team): 2600/2400 points (4 O/U)
Another excellent result with a 4th place finish, tied with Japan's A team. We actually sat right next to each other and we finished like 5 seconds earlier 😇. This round had a bunch of individual puzzles that linked up in the form of a giant Hashi. We had one teammate exclusively on Hashi duty, myself exclusively on individual puzzle duty and the other two assisting wherever necessary, which was mostly the individual puzzles at the start and the Hashi towards the second half. It turned out to be a fruitful strategy and we finished with a few minutes to spare.
Round 21 - Sanjeevani (Team): 1465/2400 points (6 O / 8 U)
The last round was the Pyramid round. We had a similar but slightly altered strategy to the previous round, with two team members exclusively assembling the pyramid and myself and another teammate exclusively solving the puzzles. We started out really well and were solving puzzles at good pace, but after a while we hit an abrupt stop and weren't able to progress anymore. Unfortunately we saw after exactly one hour (of 70m total) there was still one pyramid cube piece in the box, which we completely overlooked and forgot about. Ouch. We managed to salvage some points by using our author's intuition and correctly predicting how some of the puzzles would become unique, but it wouldn't be enough to get another outstanding result. Still, the round was a fun concept and, while it was certainly very long after an already exhausting week, it felt like a suitable end to the tournament. In the end we finished in 6th place Official, 8th place Unofficial in the overall rankings, exactly like in this round.
Some closing thoughts on WPC:
- Like WSC, puzzle quality in WPC in general was great. Again, no unreasonable puzzles, a lot of puzzles with great visual themes and/or interesting logic written into them and solid points calibration across the board.
- I did feel completely desensitized to the Ramayana theming after a while, with the same (type of) words appearing over and over again, whether as word banks or in the grids. I don't think it made the puzzles or the event worse per se, but I found it an interesting observation nonetheless.
- While not every team round hit the spot for me this year, one thing I did really appreciate in them was handing out transfer sheets to ensure every stage of a round could be attempted without risk of carrying over errors.
- Contrary to WSC, I loved the playoff format here. While for the first part you couldn't really see how the solving itself was going, having a live ranking through the competitors working their way up the hall was really fun and more than made up for it.
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Other afterthoughts
- Despite getting my own rank right (again!), I did not fulfil my promise of doing better in this year's Crystal Ball. I placed around the middle of the field this time. That third victory will have to wait. To the 6 people who thought I would get top 20: your confidence in my ability is appreciated. If you see me next year, remind me of this and I'll give you my practice puzzles for that year as a thank you 😀.
- This is the first time I've travelled to a new (for me) country for WSPC without actually seeing anything of the country beyond the commute from the airport to the hotel. I've always said I don't ever want to do that, but between falling ill, the unbearable weather in Kolkata and the massive crowds that Durga Puja drew to the city, I'm okay with not having seen India this time around. Maybe next time.
And that's all for this round-up. As always, a big thank you to all the organisers, authors, volunteers and everyone else involved for putting up two great events. I had a ton of fun at both events, even if the week didn't pan out the way I had hoped. What's more, since NL is planning to host a WSPC in the next 3 years we're also keeping a sharp eye out for any inspiration and experience that we can learn from for when the time comes, and I found a lot. That is invaluable!
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Lastly, here are my practice puzzles for this year. Rules are in the links or can be found in the IB.
3.9 - Kurarin Kurotto - https://tinyurl.com/y6bwjnp7
18.7 - Slitherlink (Invisible) - https://tinyurl.com/y287tcht
6.13/6.14 - Urumi Spirals - https://tinyurl.com/up4addbd
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