bakpao's puzzles

I participated in WSPC for the first time last week!  Having entered the competitive solving scene somewhere late 2020/early 2021, this moment finally became a reality after almost 2 years of living up to it . I now look back at one of the most wonderful weeks I've had in a long time, where especially meeting people I'd been looking forward to meeting for so long and getting to make many new friends were  the most memorable parts for me. I got 56th in sudoku and 42nd in puzzles. Lower than expected in sudoku, much higher than expected in puzzles. I suppose it makes sense, as my preparation was very heavily focused on puzzles. I was on the B team for both events because of a poor performance in the Dutch championships earlier this year, but managed to get 3rd NL in sudoku (beating 2 A team members) and 2nd in puzzles (beating all members except Bram, who was miles ahead of all of us). A couple of really silly mistakes cost me a couple spots in the overall leaderboard, but looki...

    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...

    This is a 30x30 Loop puzzle, combining 9 different genres. This puzzle was created over the course of a couple of weeks in June 2021.  While not matching the amount of posts on my blog - this is in fact the 100th puzzle I have set so far. A milestone I didn't want to let pass unnoticed, so I decided to combine as many genres from my favorite puzzle genre category as I felt comfortable with into one giant puzzle. It contains Masyu, Shingoki, Balance Loop, Country Road, Maxi Loop, Ovotovata, Yajilin, Regional Yajilin and Castle Wall.  Setting this puzzle was one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences I have had along my journey, and I definitely look forward to writing many more of these sorts of puzzles. While there is certainly room for improvement, I am incredibly proud of the end result and I hope you enjoy solving it. I am also very much indebted to Prasanna Seshadri for extensively testing the puzzle and offering useful advice, amidst a hundred ot...

    A classic Regional Yajilin puzzle. I created this puzzle on 6 June, 2021. Difficulty: 2/5 (rules from Eric Fox' Puzzle Dictionary ) Shade some cells so that no two shaded cells are orthogonally adjacent and draw a non-intersecting loop through the centers of all the remaining cells. Numbered regions must contain the indicated amount of shaded cells. https://puzz.link/p?yajilin-regions/12/12/106g2593kraaj6aimpe4l20b040r017u0gebgcb7v6hgejg83v406og122g212111i22g231g13g