bakpao's puzzles

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...

All the way back in October 2022, at WSPC in Krakow, Murat and I had the idea to organise an online contest with a special theme, meant to make solvers do a double take while solving: All puzzles were to be doppelgangers, or puzzles with a similar twist (such as expanding the grid without altering the clues, or inversing clues, like the puzzles below).  Besides the very strict theming, all the puzzles also needed to be fit for a contest and span a suitable difficulty range. Ultimately this lead to many failed attempts and many many hours spent on trying to get pairs of puzzles right. We managed to get to 12 finished puzzles for the contest before we lost the motivation to spend more time on it. We've been sitting on the puzzles ever since, waiting for inspiration to strike again one day, but unfortunately it never did and recently we decided to therefore abandon the project. A shame, but the positive is I get to showcase some of the puzzles I wrote for it here instead.  Revisi...

I was invited to write puzzles for the UKPA Open this year! The structure of this tournament was such that each author wrote an entire puzzle round by themselves, something I'd never done before. Lots of opportunities to go for fun theming, which shows throughout all the rounds (see the IBs here ).  I went for a round with 10 puzzles, divided into sets of two. A classic and a variant of the same genre, in each of the categories Loop, Shading, Region Division, Number Placement and Object Placement. I named the round "Something's Off!" in my head, a nod to each variant putting a twist on the given information somehow (with the slight exception of the Maxi Loop variant).  My round was the first of the day, and mostly leaned towards the easier side, with a couple of harder puzzles thrown in the mix. Rules are included in the penpa links for all puzzles. Puzzle 1 - Tapa - 16/383 points http://tinyurl.com/ysfobg6d A simple puzzle themed around only 2 and 4 clues, intended t...

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...