bakpao's puzzles

WSPC 2024 has concluded! I made the trip to Beijing, China to compete for the 3rd time in a row, this time on the B team in both events following my absence at the Dutch championships this year (to take part in 24HPC instead).  I finished in 54th unofficial in WSC (3rd NL and down from 38th unofficial last year) and 38th unofficial in WPC (3rd NL and up from 47th unofficial last year).  I cannot be happy with my WSC performance - I lost 175 points  alone  to puzzles where I forgot to resolve the last two cells. That means a bit of careful checking at the end of each round would have been enough to jump me to 34th place and 1st NL. Perhaps with some more preparation in the days leading up to WSC (where instead I was enjoying long, active days sightseeing around Beijing), some of the many broken puzzles could have been avoided too and who knows, my result might actually have been good. Oh well. There's always next year.  I am quite happy with my WPC performance t...

I was invited to write some puzzles for the 2023 UK Puzzle Championship! I always greatly enjoy this contest so I was happy to contribute some puzzles for it. I wrote 6 of 30 puzzles, 3 of which fairly common genres, the other 3 fairly new/obscure genres.   The contest booklets are available publicly and can be accessed via  https://ukpuzzles.org/contests.php?contestid=67  (round 1) and  https://ukpuzzles.org/contests.php?contestid=68  (round 2). The puzzles by the other authors are all great and I definitely recommend checking them out as well. Rules are included in the penpa links for all puzzles. Round 1: Cross the Streams - 22/540 points https://tinyurl.com/25dtcuxh A low pointer written at the end of the writing phase to balance out the contest a bit more, as we had quite a few puzzles leaning towards the harder end. I considered writing it around 2 and 3 clues but I had already seen quite a few puzzles of this genre using similar theming this year so ...