bakpao's puzzles

It's been well over a year since Kurotto Kingdom took place. S ome of the puzzles in that contest are some of my proudest work, but I've also been suffering from writer's block when it comes to the genre  ever since . I've managed to write maybe 3 or 4 kurotto puzzles since the contest, but have at least twice as many failed attempts.  This puzzle is the result of trying to turn a deduction that recently came to mind into a working puzzle. It still took 3 days and 5 iterations to get from starting idea to a finished puzzle that I was happy with. Hopefully the effort I put into it shows! Difficulty: 3/5 (rules from Puzzle Rules ) Shade some cells so that clues represent the total size of the orthogonally connected areas of shaded cells that share an edge with the clue. Clued cells cannot be shaded. Play on puzz.link https://puzz.link/p?kurotto/11/11/h7k7s4j9j9i3i5j7h2g7h3s2h5g2h2j3i4i3j1j8s6kbh

Kurotto Kingdom  has come to an end!  A huge thank you to everyone who participated in the contest! Whether you solved just a few of the puzzles, fought your way through all of them or woke up in the middle of the night to rack up those earlybird points, I appreciate everyone that found time in their daily schedules to solve my puzzles.  I hope you all enjoyed the puzzles and learned a bit (or a lot) about Kurotto in the process. My congratulations to IHNN / Jeffrey Bardon for winning the event, PuzzleMaestro / Freddie Hand for getting second place and EKBM / Ken Endo for taking home third place. Absolutely stellar performances. The past 3 weeks for me were filled with replay upon replay upon replay. Watching you all solve the puzzles I wrote and reading your feedback has been an incredibly exciting experience, as well as one which taught me a lot. Seeing solvers find my exact intended path through puzzles was an absolute joy, but it certainly was just as, if not more int...

    A hybrid between Kurotto and Shimaguni. I was playing around with some shading hybrid ideas today, and liked this puzzle enough to post here. Difficulty: 3/5 Rules (Classic rules from Puzzle Rules ) Normal Shimaguni and Kurotto rules apply. When two regions border a kurotto clue, but not each other, they are allowed to contain the same amount of shaded cells. Kurotto: Shade some cells so that clues represent the total size of the orthogonally connected areas of shaded cells that share an edge with the clue. Clued cells cannot be shaded. Shimaguni: Shade a single group of orthogonally connected cells in each region. Shaded groups may not share a bold border. Each region must contain at least one shaded cell, and no two adjacent regions may contain the same number of shaded cells. Play on penpa: https://git.io/JyBFE

What are these puzzles? A few months ago, I coop solved a few big puzzles with some friends. A very fun experience, but procuring suitable puzzles proved more difficult. Finding them in the first place is no easy task, and I found myself always left hoping they'd be suitable for coop solving, which quite often, they are not.  This gave me the idea to set some giant puzzles across vanilla genres. The idea behind them is simple - present the solvers with a 41x41 grid roughly divided into 4 20x20 quadrants, each with their own entry point, so solvers can work independently on parts of the grid (and a divider row/column for... reasons). With an added bonus that they're in a very easy to find place - right here. And so, after many weeks of on and off working on these puzzles, I present the first three in what will hopefully be a series I manage to keep going for a long while: A Yajilin, Tapa and Shakashaka. The puzzles mostly do not contain overly complex deductions; I found those t...

    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...

    A classic Kurotto puzzle. I created this puzzle on 2 June, 2021. Difficulty: 3/5 (rules from GM Puzzles ) Shade some cells so that each circled number represents the total count of shaded cells in connected groups sharing an edge with that number. Cells with circles cannot be shaded. Play on puzz.link https://puzz.link/p?kurotto/10/10/g0l8ham6i.g6g0j6t.j4t.j2g4g6ibm9hal.g