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...

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...

    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...