bakpao's puzzles

After supplying a round to the  offline portion of this year's UK championships , I was also invited to author some puzzles for the online event. This took place a while back, but I never got around to uploading the puzzles - here they are! I supplied five puzzles this time, of which three are in the first round and the other two in the second.  Be sure to also check out the other puzzles here (round 1) and here (round 2) . The puzzles are all good fun! Rues are included in the penpa links for all the puzzles. Enjoy! Round 1 Puzzle 1 - Balance Loop - 26/470 points https://tinyurl.com/2xq37x8s I mostly went for a striking visual theme in this one. A consequence of the lay-out I chose was that the break-in was a bit hard to find - some solvers had trouble getting started. It should be mostly smooth sailing after finding the correct entry point.

I participated in WSPC for the first time last week!  Having entered the competitive solving scene somewhere late 2020/early 2021, this moment finally became a reality after almost 2 years of living up to it . I now look back at one of the most wonderful weeks I've had in a long time, where especially meeting people I'd been looking forward to meeting for so long and getting to make many new friends were  the most memorable parts for me. I got 56th in sudoku and 42nd in puzzles. Lower than expected in sudoku, much higher than expected in puzzles. I suppose it makes sense, as my preparation was very heavily focused on puzzles. I was on the B team for both events because of a poor performance in the Dutch championships earlier this year, but managed to get 3rd NL in sudoku (beating 2 A team members) and 2nd in puzzles (beating all members except Bram, who was miles ahead of all of us). A couple of really silly mistakes cost me a couple spots in the overall leaderboard, but looki...

This year has been great for me in terms of setting. I've reflected a bit in my previous post , but something I didn't touch on there was the fact that I've also been writing for various sources, including WCPN , Topple  and a few more upcoming projects. One of my favorite experiences was writing for IPC 2021 . Being invited to write for this championship felt like a huge validation of my work and greatly motivates me to continue writing more puzzles. This post showcases the puzzles I wrote for the tournament, in order of appearance through the rounds. While this post only showcases my puzzles, each and every one of the puzzles in the IPC was of exceptional quality, and if you haven't yet, I strongly recommend checking out the other puzzles as well. The championship was filled to the brim with quality puzzles by some of the greatest puzzle constructors out there. Whether you're novice or experienced, speedsolving or solving casually, there's bound to be somethi...

    A classic Araf puzzle. I created this puzzle on 9 June, 2021. Difficulty: 4/5 (rules from GM Puzzles ) Divide the grid into some regions formed of edge-adjacent squares. Each cell is part of one region, and each region should contain exactly two given numbers. Each region must have an area that is strictly between those numbers (This means, for two number clues A and B with A < B, the area C fulfills A < C < B). Play on puzz.link https://puzz.link/p?araf/8/8/p45h7h44h87l8j2l3-10gabi5icbo