bakpao's puzzles

Here's a Rail Pool I wrote last night. The idea to try for a fully symmetric grid apart from an unused cell randomly popped in my head. The top right requires a small lookahead that I didn't manage to get rid of, other than that I think this came out really cool. Difficulty: 3/5 (rules from Puzzle Rules ) Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centers of all cells. Clues represent all the different lengths of the straight line segments that are at least partially contained within the region. Each number within a region must be represented by at least one line segment. Play on pzprxs https://pzprxs.vercel.app/p?railpool/11/11/zm23p2t1l3t4w23w4t3l1t2p23zn000660f0601g0c0u0cc00002111o0s0500k0703ggg800000000800000000000000000

Last weekend the 20th edition of the 24 hour puzzle championship in Budapest took place!  I participated for the first time and had an absolute blast. I went in fully expecting to fall asleep halfway through as I can rarely stay awake for 24 hours on end, let alone while solving puzzles. Surprisingly, staying awake wasn't the hard part - there were some rounds in the middle of the night where I would occasionally doze off for a few seconds while stuck in a puzzle, but actively solving puzzles actually was a great distraction to keep my mind off the fact I wasn't sleeping. And while fatigue is definitely a factor, there also comes a point where you just get over it, and the last few rounds were actually some of my best.  Much more troublesome was the physical pain endured from sitting at a desk and holding a pencil all that time - at some point everything just starts hurting. In the end though, I managed to stay awake (and active) the whole time, and ended up in 18th place...

Now that pzprxs is merged into puzz.link, I suppose I should really be tweeting these instead of posting them here, but so much time and effort went into these two puzzles that I feel they deserve a space on here. Rail Pool is quickly becoming a favorite - the genre has so many different setups to explore and seemingly endless amounts of fun logic to discover. The first puzzle was a battle against uniqueness. Clueing only two columns was my self-imposed theme and I initially wanted only 4 regions, but I couldn't find a setup that worked well without introducing bypasses or making the puzzle too trivial. I opted for 6 regions in the end, which ended up being a good decision - I'm really happy with this puzzle in particular. This second puzzle was originally a 11x14 grid (a result of playing around with different dimensions to find a size that worked well with my starting setup) that looked a bit weird. I reworked it into a 12x12 the next day, which works nicely.   Difficulty: 3...

Forgetful is a great variant, not just for Rail Pool but for other genres as well. I've used it before on Rassi Silai  and, in a more global fashion, Sashigane . I'm quite happy with how this puzzle came out, but setting it caused some frustration - an earlier iteration had a full region used right after the break-in and I didn't notice until an hour later. Difficulty: 3.5/5 (rules from Puzzle Rules ) Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centers of all cells, except for exactly one in each region. Clues represent the different lengths of the straight line segments that are at least partially contained within the region. Each number within a region must be represented by at least one line segment. Play on penpa https://tinyurl.com/24wlfwr3

The rail pools were some of my favorite puzzles in WPC, so I felt like writing another one for myself. I wasn't going to go for the empty middle initially but the original clue layout I chose made it almost resolve uniquely already, so I tweaked it a bit until it worked out. Difficulty: 3/5 (rules from Puzzle Rules ) Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centers of all cells. Clues represent the different lengths of the straight line segments that are at least partially contained within the region. Each number within a region must be represented by at least one line segment. Play on pzprxs https://pzprxs.vercel.app/p?railpool/10/10/m123n124w12t145s23zy34zk12p123qcd8l0k0o1g3050l2m6bqk5o3000000o3k5bq

    Rail Pool is a loop genre recently invented by Menderbug. It took a while for me to get into and really wrap my head around the ruleset, but once it clicked it almost immediately grew on me - it's very fun to solve and construct. This is my first one. Thanks to Menderbug for testing the puzzle! Difficulty: 3/5 Rules  Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centers of all cells. Numbers within a region indicate the different lengths of the line segments that enter or are completely contained within the region. (For segments contained partially in the region, the number still refers to the total length of the segment.) All numbers within a region must be represented at least once by a segment overlapping the region. Regions without clues have no information given.  A ? clue can replace any number, as long as no number is repeated in that region. Play on pzprxs https://pzprxs.vercel.app/p?railpool/10/10/k23p14zzk13n2n34zr13n12zrkb55ag05aak01akkq528826cpj00pj6c8228