Monday 14 November 2011

Puzzle #50: Ripple Effect

Returned from the World Sudoku and World Puzzle Championships, seemingly in one piece. A few bruises and scrapes over my body is all I have left over from it. Finished nicely in 5th place after the 2 days of puzzling, which came as a surprise to me. I was expecting to have to battle really hard for a place in the top 10, but always remained comfortably in 4th or 5th place through the 2 days. Maybe on location competitions just suit me better than online competitions. Or maybe it's just that I am far more focussed sitting on a desk in relative silence opposed to solving online competitions in a lazy chair with the tv in the background. A bit too bad on my play off performance. A lousy No Four in a Row solve, a dumb Battleships solve and a stray circle in my Pointing at the Crowd puzzle, made me just miss out making the 7 person cut. I'm happy with my overall performance none-the-less.

Now back to actual puzzles. I know some people might have expected something special for number 50. I have been working on two ideas which were far harder than I had imagined to complete. I'm not even sure if one of them will ever work out, but it's nice to try challenging myself. As I couldn't complete either of them and I hadn't posted anything in over a week, I figured I should at least post something.
I've had a few of my puzzles published in Akil Oyunlari. It contains four Turning Fences and two Ripple Effect puzzles by my hand. Some of the Ripple Effect puzzles I had submitted were considered too hard for the magazine. I had somewhat expected they might be, but then again it said I could make some puzzles as hard as I wanted. I really loved the design of those puzzles, so I'm posting them here now. These two Ripple Effect puzzles have some very noticable designs. The first has a cute four by four square in the middle, which I've used in other puzzles before. The second has a nice stairs pattern in the right bottom corner. I hope you enjoy them.

Rules for Ripple Effect




2 comments:

  1. Fun, thanks. They don't seem to be *that* hard.

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  2. Well it's all a matter of relativity. This would have been the first appearance of Ripple Effect in the magazine, and thus the first encounter for many. When you've done more of mine they are somewhat familiar. But otherwise they aren't the easiest to approach when you get a number puzzle with seemingly no clues.

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