bakpao's puzzles

I participated in the 24 Hour Puzzle Championship again! It took place right after WSPC, in Eger, Hungary. If you've not had a chance to take a look at the puzzles yet, they are available here . Definitely check them out! This was the 22nd edition of the event, and it was my third time participating. I ranked 23rd this time, down from 13th last year. At first glance that seems like a significant drop, but with some 100 more participants this year, many of which are typically stronger solvers than myself, I'm pretty content with my result. I'd say I would have done better if I had prepared more for the event (which I hadn't much, because of WSPC), but I think that holds true for almost everyone there.  As always, the event was fantastic and tons of fun. I especially loved doing it with this many more people. I hope we see many of them return for future editions. Unlike previous years, this year's edition came directly after a week of already exhausting WSPC solving, ...

Last week, the GAPP project in the CTC server reached its 1000th day. To celebrate, the authors (myself included) collaborated on a large shading mashup, which was very positively received by many of our solvers. Feel free to check out the puzzle here , if you are in the CTC discord. Since my 100 blog entries milestone was also coming up, and I never ended up writing a big puzzle when I reached 1000 puzzles authored, I decided to write another puzzle on the same grid we used for GAPP1K, with the same genres and (mostly the same) rules, but without the difficulty cap. I expected the puzzle to take longer to finish, but it seems I got into a groove, and here it is!  Overall I'm very happy with it - I managed to preserve symmetry in all grids except the Half Piece one (where it really wasn't working out no matter what I tried) and built in lots of cool interactions between the various genres.  This puzzle is a fair bit more difficult and narrow than the GAPP one, so if you want t...

A fairly simple proof of concept that I wrote last night, to see if this combination works well and is worth diving into more in the future. I think it does! Difficulty: 2.5/5 (Base Canal View and LITS rules from Puzzle Rules ) Shade one tetromino of cells in each region so that all shaded cells form one orthogonally connected area and no 2x2 region is entirely shaded. Two tetrominoes of the same shape may not touch orthogonally, counting rotations and reflections as the same. Clues cannot be shaded, and represent the number of shaded cells connected in a straight line horizontally or vertically to the clue. Solve on Penpa https://tinyurl.com/2hcy2l5u

    Two classic Canal Views. The first one was created on 1 November, 2021. The second one was a speedsetting entry (1 hour limit) on 3 November, 2021, taking third place of 13 entries. Difficulty: 3/5 (#1), 2.5/5 (#2) (rules from GM Puzzles ) Shade some empty cells black to create a single connected group. Cells with numbers cannot be shaded, and the shaded cells cannot form a 2×2 square anywhere in the grid. Each numbered cell indicates the total count of shaded cells connected vertically and horizontally to that numbered cell. Puzzle 1 - Solve on penpa https://tinyurl.com/yrkkbkru Puzzle 2 - Solve on penpa https://tinyurl.com/yvmxcqr5