Puzzle #191: Word Packs

Two weeks ago was the Dutch round of the WPF Grand Prix 2016. I wrote all the puzzles for this set, both the casual and competitive section. The sets can be found on the following links: Casual and Competitive. Not all puzzles I had written were used as the set, either because they were not needed or were too difficult. This post contains the puzzles of one type that weren't used.

This post will contain two Word Packs puzzles. This was the only type to be included in the Casual section. It's a type that I've seen in Breinbrekers before, but not really anywhere else as far as I can remember. I thought it would fit in well in the casual round. It was judged to be too varying in solving times to get an accurate rating for it. As the Casual section wasn't finished by anyone, it wasn't really missed. These puzzles generally work in a similar way. It's all a matter of understanding the logic involved. Usually the words are themed, to make it a bit more interesting. The themes I used for these two puzzles were Animals and Countries.

Rules for Word Packs

Place the given words in the grid, so that each rectangle contains exactly one word. Words in rectangles that touch each other can't contain the same letter.

Puzzle #1

 

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Puzzle #2

 

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16th 24-Hour Puzzle Championship

The 16th 24-Hour Puzzle Championship was held in Budapest this weekend. As always the championship featured 14 puzzle sets to be solved over 24 hours, with each round lasting 100 minutes, with only 10 or 20 minute breaks in between. Neil Zussman was this year's winner with a slim 10 point lead over Robert Vollmert in second place and a 23 point lead over Michael Mosshammer in third place. Full results can be found here.

All puzzles of this championship (except round 11) can be found here. If you need an example of any of the puzzles, you can find the instruction booklets here.

I provided a set again this year. It was the 8th set to be solved between 11pm and 12:40am. The set contained 24 puzzles. It featured 12 genres, with one puzzle being a standard and one puzzle being a variant. I was originally going to include only 6 genres and two standard puzzles and two variants. I found it hard to decide on the genres to provide enough variation. I tried to keep all variations different per genre, to add to the variation in the round. I think it ended up being a good mix.
Robert Vollmert was the top scorer of the round with 810 points.

Puzzles can be found below

2014 Slovak Puzzle Championships

While going through my puzzle files, I came across the Slovak Championships folder. I realised I had never shared these puzzles on my blog. So I figured I might as well share them now.
I was contacted by Zuzanna Hromcova to write puzzles for their championship. We were given a number of categories to write puzzles in. One of the categories was non-grid puzzles, for which I provided three different genres; namely ABC Decoder, Dice and Mastermind. Dice and ABC Decoder are types I enjoy writing; Mastermind I didn't have that much experience with. But it was something I'd like to give a go.
The other categories I picked were Latin Squares and Division puzzles. For each type we had to write a standard genre and a variant on the genre. I picked Skyscrapers, with Haido as the variant. I like Skyscrapers and I thought Haido still had part of the Skyscraper logic, but used differently enough to make it not like solving four skyscraper puzzles.
For the Division set I picked ABCD Division, with Sum Division as the variant. It's a type I have seen a lot when I first started puzzling, but I haven't really seen it much since. I thought sums was an obvious variant, but I haven't really seen it this way much. I have seen a similar variant where the grid has to be divided into a complete set of pentominoes, but not really without this restriction.

I tried to put a bit of theming in the non-grid puzzles. I wrote a few nine digit ABC Decoders for the 2014 24 hour championships, and I thought that was a good size to use in a championship. The letters spell out THE SLOVAK, which was the nicest way I could use nine different letters to write something Slovakia related. I found some words with opposite meanings in the letter set, so I used those. I think it turned out well.
I used a similar opposites theme for the Dice puzzle, with an addition of 5 words to make it unique. I think not all words are necessary for uniqueness, but it solves pretty well this way.
The first Mastermind puzzle looks really nice, with a sequence of numbers and only white circles it solves really nicely. The second one was merely an attempt to construct a nice logical 5 digit puzzle.

I thought both Skyscrapers puzzles turned out nicely. The first puzzle uses three 4s and three 5s. The second puzzle has a trio of the same digit on each side. Of course I couldn't use four different digits as these are the only three digits you can have three of the same clue on the same side in this size.
I find it hard to theme Haido puzzles as the clues are a bit limited, but they both have nice logical paths.

The first time I saw an ABCD puzzle this way was at a Dutch championship. It was a bit of a surprise then. I wrote a similar puzzle for puzzlepicnic once and I thought it would be fun to include one for the championship. The ABCDE puzzle is a standard layout and I think it solves well.
The sum puzzles were a bit hard to work out openings at first as there are so many ways to reach the sums. So I went with obvious opening digits for both puzzles to then work back to more ambiguous digits towards the end. I think they both turned out well.

Puzzles can be found below.

14th 24 Hour Puzzle Championship

This year I wrote a set of puzzles together with Hns Eendebak. I was a bit tight on time with a holiday and other championships that I wasn't sure if I'd be able to write everything in time. I still ran a bit late getting everything together but it was in time for the championship.
This year's championship was won by Peter Hudak. Nikola Zivanovic and Zoltan Horvath finished second and third.
There were 30 competitors total in this year's championship, of which 29 did our set. The set was a bit on the long side this year with the Michael Mosshammer from Austria being the top scorer with 695 points. It would have been better if the top scorer had about 100-150 points more. The set contained 24 puzzles in total, so I should have probably cut 2 puzzles in the end.
In this post I will be adding all the puzzles I wrote. You can find the complete set and all other sets here. If you need to see the instruction booklets for any of the set you can find them in this forum post.

Puzzles can be found below.

Puzzle #139: ABC Decoder

This weekend is the Word Show test on Logic Master India, written by Nikola Zivanovic. It features 12 different puzzle types which all involve words. It includes standard puzzles types like Scrabble and Word Search, but also common puzzle types featuring words, like Word Nurikabe, Full Tapa and Sigma Snake. there are a few examples of some types on my blog. There's a Full Tapa in my TVC XI practise set, a Snail's Nest in my European Championship set (although the actual one will probably be more like the one featured at this year's USPC) and a Word Nurikabe from last year's 24 Hour Puzzle Championship, which I haven't seen anywhere else.
Today's puzzle will be an ABC Decoder. It's a type I always really enjoy. Part of the reason is that Richard Stolk always makes really nice ones. These feature often in Breinbrekers. They always have some nice theme going on in the words. I've made a few of these puzzles before, one of them featured in my LMI Hybrids test. It was made a bit easier so it would be more suitable for a puzzle competition. This puzzle features all puzzle genres. It is most likely harder than the one that will feature on the test, but it will still be good practise on how to solve these types of puzzles.

Rules:

Every letter is encoded with a different integer from 1~26. In the given set of Puzzle Genres all letters occur except the letter Q. The numbers behind the words indicate the sum of the value of each letter in each word. Determine the value of all letters.

13th 24 Hour Puzzle Championship

The 13th 24 Hour Puzzle Championship was held last weekend. Nikola Zivanovic was the winner, with a close margin over Florian Kirch in second place. Peter Hudak completed the podium finishing third. Full results can be seen here.
I think this set worked out better than last year's. The topscorer in my set was Florian Kirch with 845/1000 points and everyone solving scored at least 100 points.

Opposed to last year, I will release my entire set in a single post. Last year I was still trying to keep up one post a day, but I've let that go for a while now. The post will not contain any examples, but you can see examples of each genre in the instruction booklet. My set is the 12th set, so you'll have to scroll down a bit. The puzzles have their value listed and are valued at about 10 points per minute.

Puzzles can be found below.

Puzzle #137: Crossword

The instruction booklet for the 24 Hour Puzzle Championship is out. My puzzle set will be the second to last set that is solved. Some of my puzzle examples are worth solving in my opinion. I'd especially single out the Battleships Observer, Killer Sudoku and Complementary Hexa Sudoku examples.
This Crossword puzzle is the last puzzle I made that won't appear in the set. I am not very strong at creating logic Word puzzles. I am not totally sure how to approach them. The way I do it, is that I create a grid with words and then check if it solves uniquely in a logical way. I've seen similar layouts for Crossword puzzles like mine before and I always approach them in the same way. That's how I made sure this one solved logically. I'd love to hear from other puzzle makers how they general go about creating logic Word puzzles as that's something I'd like to get the hang of at some point.
This puzzle is challenging. I'd love to hear what people think of it though.

Rules:

Place all but 3 of the given words in the grid, so that they can be read left to right or top to bottom. Every cell will contain one letter.

Example

Puzzle

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Puzzle #53: Word Nurikabe

I also wanted to put in some puzzles with letters. But I generally have a lot of trouble designing puzzles with words. I tried putting in some word search and scrabble like puzzles, but they just didn't come out in any pleasing way. So i thought of using words in other genres I could work with. Nurikabe ended up being a nice choice. The trick of course was to make sure that the letters couldn't be all directly assigned to a word, because then the number of the island would be instantly known and it wouldn't be any different than a normal Nurikabe.
The design ended up really nice, with the word choice being related to the event and the puzzle.

Rules for Nurikabe

In this puzzle the number clues are replaced by letters and the islands by words. The words that have to be placed are listed on the side. Each word has one letter given. The words have to be placed so that they can be read by moving horizontally and vertically along the squares. check the example below in case something isn't clear.