bakpao's puzzles

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

I went to participate in the 24 hour puzzle championship in Budapest again last weekend!  This was the 21st edition of the event, and it was my second time participating after my debut last year, in which I ranked 18th. This time I ranked 13th , so a solid improvement! Looking at the attendee list before the event, I thought my best possible result would be 12th, but also felt like I should be getting at least 14th. So, just like in 2023's WPC, I finished exactly where I predicted ahead of the event. Ironically, I didn't receive points for two puzzles that I solved fine, but only noticed it after the event was concluded - had I gotten them, I would have jumped to 12th place... :suseyes: Like last year, the event was tons of fun and a fantastic experience. I wasn't sure for a long while whether I would attend, as the tournament coincided with the Dutch championships. Since I intend to participate in WSPC later this year and our championships serve as the selection process f...

I felt randomly inspired to write a Tapa / LITS puzzle, one of my favorite hybrid combinations. Difficulty: 3/5 (Base rules from  Puzzle Rules ) Normal Tapa and LITS rules apply. Clues cannot be shaded.  No 2x2 region may be entirely shaded. Tapa: Shade some cells so that all shaded cells form one orthogonally connected area. Clues cannot be shaded, and represent the lengths of the blocks of consecutive shaded cells in the (up to) eight cells surrounding the clue.  LITS: Shade one tetromino of cells in each region so that all shaded cells form one orthogonally connected area. Two tetrominoes of the same shape may not share a bold border, counting rotations and reflections as the same. No 2x2 region may be entirely shaded. Play on penpa https://tinyurl.com/2g3w87lr

    A hybrid Tapa / LITS puzzle When updating my spreadsheet with all my puzzles yesterday, I noticed I was at exactly 299 puzzles set. Another milestone about to be reached. Not wanting to pass up the opportunity to do something for it, and having some free time, I naturally spent the rest of the day working on something a bit larger and celebratory.  To reflect, that's about 250 puzzles created in 2021, so far. Around 5 every week. 62 unique genres and 6 giants. Those are numbers I am extremely happy with and hope I can get to keep up into the new year.  Difficulty: 3/5 (rules from Puzzle Rules ) Normal Tapa and LITS rules apply. Clues cannot be shaded. Tapa: Shade some cells so that all shaded cells form one orthogonally connected area. Clues cannot be shaded, and represent the lengths of the blocks of consecutive shaded cells in the (up to) eight cells surrounding the clue. No 2x2 region may be entirely shaded. LITS: Shade one tetromino of cells in each region so...

   A hybrid puzzle linking a Tapa and LITS together. This was mostly experimental and is on the easier side , but still solves cutely. Difficulty: 2/5 Rules (For standard tapa / LITS rules, refer to this document ) Normal tapa rules apply in the left grid Normal LITS rules apply in the right grid No cell can be shaded in both grids Solve on penpa