bakpao's puzzles

Last year, I was invited to write puzzles for the 2024 Serbian Puzzle Championships!  It was my first time writing for this tournament, and I was briefed a structure where there would be 5 sets of puzzles: 1x Classics, 1x Variants, 1x Novelties, 1x Miniatures, 1x Longer Classics. It was never really clear to me whether I was supposed to write an entire set by myself or provide some puzzles for each set, so I ended up going for the latter. It turned out my submissions would all be in a single round (my own). Had I known, I probably would have opted for a different structure or maybe a common theme, but I think it ended up working quite well. Sticking to the categories meant the set has a nice variety to it.   The tournament ultimately was postponed and didn't happen in 2024, but it finally took place at the end of last month.  This is why a few of the puzzles are still themed around the number 24.  I also believe it was a shared championships between Serbia and Croati...

   We regularly host speedsetting sessions in the CTC discord. The concept is simple: a host sets a prompt - usually a (pool of) genre(s), a theme or other constraint - to work with, participants then set a puzzle around that prompt in the allotted time, usually one hour. Judges then solve all the puzzles and decide their top three favorites, which are declared the winners! These are always fun events. Not only do they encourage me to set genres or constraints I normally wouldn't, there's also a strategic element involved where you have to make rapid decisions on what genre to go with, grid dimensions, theming - all before and while setting a functional, interesting puzzle. An hour seems like quite some time, but more often than not I find myself battling against the clock. The puzzles that I write during speedsets tend to not be published anywhere other than in Discord, even though they can be quite nice. They're not as refined as my usual puzzles, but that's the charm...

    Happy birthday and happy 500 puzzles to me! Here's a loop mashup to celebrate. I kind of made things very difficult for myself with the PGP R4 mock puzzle set I made last weekend. While updating my spreadsheet with all my puzzles afterwards, I noticed I was extremely close to 500 puzzles set. What's more, it's also my birthday today and I turn 27, which also happens to be my favorite number. Too many milestones and reasons for celebration, meaning I couldn't really pass up the opportunity to set something for it.  The problem, however: I only noticed this last Wednesday, and I was to leave for Spain on Friday, where I currently am to enjoy a long overdue holiday. I had to be on standby for work on Thursday and do the usual holiday preparations, so there really wasn't much time to set a puzzle.  Luckily I still managed to find a few focus hours and came up with this puzzle which I'm decently happy with. No doubt in my mind that if I had more time, I would...

Two classic Equality puzzles, one a fair bit more difficult than the other. I started playing around with this genre following a speedset we had in the discord themed around genres containing the letter Q on grids shaped like a Q (bonus points if you can guess who hosted it). I chose to set Equality for it, despite never having solved or set one before. I really liked the genre from the little experience it gave me, so I was very eager to take another look, resulting in these two puzzles. They're not the prettiest grids (mostly a result of, in my experience, symmetrical grids leading to very repetitive logic) but I'm quite happy with the logic they have hidden inside them. Difficulty: 2.5/5 for the first, 3.5/5 for the second (rules from Puzzle Rules ) Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centers of some cells which passes through each region at least twice. Every visit to a particular region must occupy an equal number of cells. A clue in a region indicates the number of c...