This time I started at the end of the booklet. this is partly because I had a nice idea for Tapa Tapa and partly because I am somewhat looking up to making a Make Room for Tapa and Wired Tapa puzzle. Can't really get those two started. Sadly I won't be posting my Tapa Tapa puzzle as I missed a rule regarding the Tapa cities. They can only have a segments of 1 cell around them, which I didn't do for my puzzle at all. Overall I'm happy with the puzzles, but I guess there's always room for a little improvement. I will post it after the test again, like I did before with a puzzle that broke the test rules. Next time I'll be more careful reading the rules and not just by checking the example.
The Roman Tapa is pretty basic. I think it is some good practise in breaking apart possible givens.
Sweeper Tapa has a nice opening. I could have put down TAPA everywhere instead of PARA, but thought that might happen in the test, so I figured I could just make it read my own nick everywhere. This puzzle is pretty hard though, so I put an easier variant of this puzzle in the second set. It will probably be better practise.
Tapa Like Loop is a fun genre, even though I question its Tapa-ness. I think it turned out a nice puzzle. I'm expecting this puzzle to go a bit bigger in the test.
Tapa Borders is not my best puzzle, especially in comparison to Palmer's. I had a nice idea for the basic structure of the puzzle, but I couldn't make it work completely the way I wanted to. Still helpful practise I think though.
The puzzles can be found below.
Rules for Tapa
6. Roman Tapa
Use regular Tapa Rules. Additionally all Tapa clues are represented as Roman Numerals. A clue may represent one or more digits, written succesively. A VI clue for example, may represent a 6 or a 5-1 clue. Clues are not necessarily in increasing order.
7. Sweeper Tapa
Use regular Tapa rules. After the wall is blackened no symbol may appear more than once in every row or column.
8. Tapa Like Loop
Draw a single continuous loop that connects the centers of cells horizontally and vertically. The loop may not touch or cross itself. The numbers in the grid indicate the amount of neighbouring cells visited by the loop. If there's more than one number in the cell, they should be represented by seperate loop segements. There is no 2x2 rule in this puzzle.
9. Tapa Borders
Follow regular Tapa rules. Additionally some borders may be bold or missing. When there is a bold border between 2 cells it means one of the two is coloured and the other is not. When the border is missing, it means they are either both coloured, or both not.
Nice puzzles, and I like what you did with Borders.
ReplyDeleteI just can't seem to wrap my head around Sweeper Tapa. Took a long time on Melon's too compared to the rest of the pack, and am completely stumped on this one. Btw, I remember reading in the IB that its gonna be symbols, so I think "Tapa" is out of the question.
As for the rules thing, thats not a problem, we're all bound to miss something. These practice ones helps everyone understand things better.
I didn't have a whole lot of luck with this Sweeper Tapa either. I basically used classic Tapa rules to get the general gist of the wall, which involved some fairly unclean T&E, and then the Sweeper rules only came in at the end to force uniqueness.
ReplyDeleteSimilar issue with the Roman. I eventually cracked the top left VI and the whole thing was easy after that, but it wasn't very logical and I think I missed something.
Loop and Borders solved fine though.
Roman solved fine for me. I think it uses a lot of area-blockage and connectivity logic to work. The top left "IIII" is forced because of the way the wall has to go using the top "II" at least a bit on its other side, since it can't really go downwards as 2 disjoint parts of the wall.
DeleteStill stumped on the Sweeper though (as in solved through T&E eventually but not getting the logical solve).
Like Prasanna said, the Roman Tapa works on the fact that the IIII needs to be 2 parts and they can't both travel down between the III, IIIII and IIII. So it has to get past the II.
DeleteI agree the Sweeper Tapa might be a bit too hard, so I changed it a bit and posted a new one in the second set. It kept the same opening I had in mind for this one.