bakpao's puzzles

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...

    A set of 4 puzzles, linked through Mastermind clues. I created this puzzle on 27 June, 2021. This is a revised  version of my entry to a speedsetting competition hosted on the CTC Discord, in which the original puzzle I created took 3rd place. We were prompted to choose at least two of the 4 genres which appear in this puzzle, and link them through Mastermind clues of our choosing. The original puzzle was made in around 90 minutes. I was doing really well, but resolving the Aqre nicely proved to be a challenge, due to my limited experience both solving and setting the genre, resulting in a puzzle that I was mostly satisfied with, but ultimately left a sour taste, as I knew I could do better with the Aqre grid. Today I revisited it and tweaked it, and the end result is much nicer to walk through.  Difficulty: 3/5 Normal aqre, kurotto, nurikabe and tapa rules apply. (Not listing all the rules here, they can however be found in Eric Fox' Puzzle Rules ). Additionally...