bakpao's puzzles

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...

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...

    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 Yajilin puzzle. I created this puzzle on 27 June, 2021. Difficulty: 3/5 (rules from Eric Fox' Puzzle Rules ) 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 empty cells. Clues cannot be shaded, and represent the number of shaded cells in a straight line in the indicated direction. Play on puzz.link https://puzz.link/p?yajilin/b/15/15/0.n0.k32i23d23h103.11c34g120.a0.22i310.c41h314.h31c430.h3.34d314.h32e320.c41j220.a0.13k210.21c13i14d35b0.k31b0.n

    A loop mashup containing elements of Yajilin, Masyu and Slitherlink. I created this puzzle on 7 June, 2021. This puzzle was my submission to a 90m speedsetting session in the CTC discord, themed around Ghost Train mashups (that can be found on LMD most recently,  here  in round 8). This entry got second place in the contest.  We were presented with a selection of rules which we could build our puzzle around, in the category number placement, shading and loops. I settled for a hybrid construction that most resembles yajilin, but combines slitherlink and masyu elements and digits to add an extra spice to the traditional shading. The full briefing as presented to us at the time can be found  here . Difficulty: 3/5 Draw a single closed, non-intersecting loop, following regular Masyu and Slitherlink rules.  Each row and column must contain the digit 1 once. 1s cannot touch orthogonally and cannot be shaded. The loop cannot pass through cells filled with...