bakpao's puzzles

WSPC and 24HPC 2025 have concluded! This post will recap only WSPC - 24HPC will be in a different post, probably in a few days after I finish post-solving the rounds.  This was my 4th year in a row participating in WSPC. I was on the A team for Sudoku and on the B team for Puzzles this year.  I finished in 29th unofficial in WSC (25th official, 1st NL and up from 54th unofficial last year) and 38th unofficial in WPC (2nd NL, same rank as last year).  Last year I wasn't happy with my WSC performance. This year I dedicated almost all of my preparation time ahead of the championship week to sudoku, and my performance felt better because of it. I still feel like I performed rather poorly in a couple of rounds, especially on day 1, so (as always...) there remains plenty of room to do better. Overall though, breaching the top 30 and securing the top spot in NL feels like a solid improvement over last year. Because my focus on WSC inevitably meant a lack of preparation for WPC t...

Unequal Lengths is a pretty common variant for loop genres, but I don't think I've ever seen or solved a Tapa-Like Loop with it. This is a first exploration - the combination has some limitations but overall seems to have quite a bit of potential and can result in interesting puzzles. Difficulty: 3/5 (base rules from Puzzle Rules ) Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centers of some empty cells. Clues represent the numbers of consecutive cells occupied by the loop each time it enters the (up to) eight cells surrounding the clue.  Variant: Consecutive segments along the loop cannot have the same length.  Play on penpa https://tinyurl.com/2p2as3uw

Something experimental today. I quite like the big clues variation and decided to have a go at setting a TLL with it. The logic doesn't get too complex for this, but I think it's a smooth and fun solve. Difficulty: 2.5/5 Rules Draw a non-intersecting loop through the center of some empty cells. Clues represent the numbers of consecutive cells occupied by the loop each time it enters the cells surrounding the clue. Play on penpa https://tinyurl.com/y8rocheg

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...

    A variant Tapa-Like Loop puzzle. I created this puzzle on 27 July, 2021. It was my entry to a speedsetting contest in the CTC discord revolving around loop puzzles with rotationally symmetrical regions. We were allowed to add one rule into the prompt, I chose a tapa-like loop aspect. The puzzle took first place. Difficulty: 2/5 (TLL rules from Eric Fox' Puzzle Rules ) Draw a single non-intersecting, non-crossing and non-branching loop in the grid. The loop must travel through all grey areas and must follow a rotationally symmetric path in each grey area.  Numbers inside grey regions indicate how many cells in the area are used by the loop.  Clues in the grid are regular tapa-like loop clues:  Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centers of some empty cells. Clues represent the numbers of consecutive cells occupied by the loop each time it enters the (up to) eight cells surrounding the clue. Solve on penpa