TVC XII Practise Part 3

And here is the last part of practise puzzles. Or maybe the first part if you go by the order of the instruction booklet. I'm a bit late as I noticed an error in one of the puzzles and had to rectify it. I think out of these puzzles I like the Compass Tapa the best. The path oriented structure in it works very well. I also like the Twilight Tapa, but I'm finding them hard to construct.

Firstly the Visionary Tapa. I think it worked out well. The double clue structure makes the puzzle always a bit more challeging, but overall it's not too hard. At least once you get past the opening.
Secondly there's Make Room for Tapa. This puzzle is pretty easy. In the test it will most likely be a lot harder if we go by the puzzle that has been in the test before. Some of Thomas' puzzles will be more at that difficulty.
The Twilight Tapa is the hardest in this set. I found some interest number combinations that are semi unique. I used one as the opening here. Semi unique here means that there are 2 ways to colour that both look the same, except the coloured and white cells are switched around.
The Compass Tapa worked out well. It is of medium difficulty. I'm expecting trickier puzzles in the test for this one.
The Wired Tapa is nothing special. It just feels like a lot of the same. I didn't really think I put in much interesting. One part I liked, but I'm not even sure if that is necessary to solve.

The puzzles can be found below.
[After a bunch of edits I hope they are actually all correct now. Sighhhhhhhh.]

TVC XII Practise Part 2

Here is the second part of practise puzzles. This set contains a Broken Tapa, Tapa Tapa and a Sweeper Tapa. I've recreated the Sweeper Tapa. This is because I agreed with the comments that it might be a bit too hard for a practise puzzle. I think this one flows a bit smoother, but still uses the same opening and a similar layout as the first puzzle.
The Broken Tapa is a challenging puzzle. But I expect the actual puzzle on the test will also be challenging. Of course I won't know for sure till I see the points table tomorrow. I still think it's a fun puzzle though.
The Sweeper Tapa should be a bit nicer than my first one. Sometimes you need that extra bit of time to make the puzzle better.
The Tapa Tapa worked out okay. It's a nice variation, except I find the 1 clue constraint around the cities a bit restricting as they block a lot of the paths for the Tapa. Remember that the numbers indicate the shortest possible routes.

Puzzles can be found below.

TVC XII Practise Part 1

Even though Palmer also made a practise set, I figured I would still give it a go. I've been having fun making them, so I went at it again. I think it will help my solving in the end.
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.

TVC XII

The first observation one can make in this test is that the definition of Tapa is being stretched a bit for this test. Wired Tapa and Tapa Like Loop don't really seem to be actually Tapas to me. They just employ a similar clue type. I somewhat feel that if there isn't a Tapa Wall, it's not a Tapa.
Secondly, many of these variants already have a few examples available. I've collected the places I have been able to find examples of the puzzles in this test.

Palmer Mebane's Practise Set:

http://mellowmelon.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/tvc-xii-practice-pack/

Visionary Tapa: 

TVC XI: http://logicmastersindia.com/lmitests/?test=TVC11
TVC XI  practise: http://puzzleparasite.blogspot.com/2012/03/tvc-xi-practise-part-1.html

Make Room for Tapa:

Thomas Snyder's Blog:
http://motris.livejournal.com/137423.html
http://motris.livejournal.com/138177.html
http://motris.livejournal.com/163574.html
TVC VII: http://logicmastersindia.com/TVC/VII/

Twilight Tapa: 

Logic Master's Deutschland:  http://logicmasters.de/Raetselportal/Raetsel/zeigen.php?id=0000F0
Palmer Mebane's Blog: http://mellowmelon.wordpress.com/2011/08/31/puzzle-351/

Compass Tapa:

Takeya Saikachi's Blog: http://buyaketa.blogspot.com/2012/02/compass-tapa.html

Broken Tapa:

Logic Masters India, Broken Pieces: http://logicmastersindia.com/lmitests/?test=M201008P
Logic Master India, Best of LMI Puzzle Tests: http://logicmastersindia.com/lmitests/?test=M201112P

Roman Tapa:

TVC VIII: http://logicmastersindia.com/lmitests/?test=TVC8

Tapa Like Loop:

Takeya Saikachi's Blog: http://buyaketa.blogspot.com/2012/02/tapa-like-loop.html

Tapa Borders:

Palmer Mebane's Blog:
http://mellowmelon.wordpress.com/2012/01/04/puzzle-382/
http://mellowmelon.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/puzzle-388/

Puzzle #102: Penta Sight

This pentomino variant is a bit like a mix between Pentopia and Kurodoku puzzles. It currently leans a bit more towards Pentopia, because it implements a no touching rule. I could also make it lean a bit more to Kurodoku and allow diagonal touching and have all white cells form a single contiguous area. But I'll leave that for another try. I might make a seperate rules page if I try this again. Just like to see how people like it now.

Rules:

Place a number of different pentomino pieces in the grid. Rotations and reflections are considered the same piece. The pieces aren't allowed to touch eachother, not even diagonally. The numbers in the grid indicate how many white cells can be seen from that cell in all horizontal and vertical directions, including the cell itself. Pentomino pieces block their sight.

Puzzle #101: Island

Another easier Island puzzle. I like the layout, just couldn't get all circles in order.

Rules for Island

Puzzle #100: Maxi Loop

What is this? A puzzle and it's not a Tapa? How odd. It means I'm resuming my puzzle posts. I tried to make something special for puzzle #100 but my idea crashed and burned. It now occupies about 3 pages in my notebook but still isn't finished as it doesn't want to cooperate into a solvable, unique puzzle. It was actually my second idea as I had an idea with cubes at first. But I scrapped that idea as I got no comments on my LITS cube. I was really happy with that puzzle and was expecting some feedback on it. I figure no one felt like solving a puzzle on a cube when they have to construct it themselves.
Here's a Maxi Loop puzzle. I hadn't posted one in a while as I made the choice to put out Liar Loop puzzles instead. I think it worked out well. It's relativey difficult. The most tricky deductions come towards the end on the left side of the puzzle.

Rules for Maxi Loop

TVC XI Recap

I didn't do so well this time. Okay, I finished 8th, which isn't really that bad. It's just that this puts me behind in the standings a bit. I am still ranked 4th overall with a small gap to 3rd, but when you take only the best 2 out of 3, which is what's really important the gap widens considerably. Both Hideaki and Ko will be far ahead of me then for 3rd place.
I had one of my false starts again, not solving anything the first 10 minutes by breaking the Meiosis Tapa twice. After that it went okay till I attempted the Full Tapa. I kept breaking it till after four attempts I noticed I had missed the word MAN. This is why I prefer simple lists of words, so it's far less likely to miss a word. These gimmicks can be interesting to some, but I don't like them very much for competitions. Then I spent a long time looking for the opening around the 5^1/2^1^2 in the Power of Tapa, but when I found it, it went smooth. I made a silly mistake in the Tapa Balance, having the left 4 wrong. I found the Modern Tapa much harder than the 43 points it was worth. I got the solution to the hard Mad Max Tapa 5 seconds over the 75 minute mark, but I wasn't convinced it was correct so I didn't submit it.
As for my puzzles, I nailed the Tapa Balance idea. I hadn't done it as extreme as Serkan, but I saw the skewed balance coming. I thought the Dissected, Visionary and Fractional Tapas were good preparing practice for the test. The Modern Tapa didn't help me get through the puzzle any smoother. The Meiosis Tapa in the test was somewhat gimmicky. I'm not a fan of overt symmetry in puzzles, where both the clues and solution on each side is the same. I thought my Full Tapa was less intuitive than the one in the test. I also thought it was easier to work my Mad Max Tapa, but when I saw that a lot of the Tapa was actually solvable, I must admit I had missed that.
I hope they helped other people as well and will try to bring out another set next time.

TVC XI Practise Part 3

Here are the last few examples for TVC XI. They are a bit on the late side, but I had only 3 days. I did what I could. These genres were the trickiest to construct, so that's why they come last. I don't know how representative of the test they will be as they can be a lot harder than what I made now. I just needed puzzles that I could logically construct. I am also learning the logic involved in these genres.

First up is the Full Tapa. I had a lot of trouble to come up with an idea for this puzzle. When I settled on the 3 and 4 word lengths it slowly got started. I like how it worked out. Most of the puzzle runs on the word lengths, but you need to place the words to get to a unique solution. I assume it's easier than the actual test puzzle, considering the amount of points it's worth.
Secondly is the Power of Tapa puzzle. I don't think it's especially hard. Tried to get a mix of power and normal clues in, but didn't succeed as well as I had hoped. It's still a nice puzzle. The puzzle in the test is worth a the most points of all puzzles, so will most likely be harder.
Lastly the Meiosis Tapa. It's really tricky to construct because there are a lot of options for multiclue cells. Which is also why I avoided multiclue cells for the most part of the puzzle. I at least succeeded in implementing both types of division in the puzzle. It's not too hard, but as the points table goes, it could be of equal difficulty of the test puzzle.

Puzzles can be found below.

TVC XI Practise Part 2

Today features the least finicky puzzles in the test. For these 4 you can pretty much expect a nice logic solve. The remaining three are variants that I haven't worked out how to construct nicely yet. Especially the Full Tapa is a problem as I can't even figure out how to solve the example in the booklet. There's a chance I will find a way to make it work for me, which isn't reflective of the actual test. Battle Tapa from TVC IX was a good example of that.

First up is the Combined Tapa. I'm not really happy with the Digital Tapa part because of the changed 0 rule, but the rest is nice in my opinion. It is 12 by 12 just like the previous time a Combined Tapa appeared on the TVC.
Secondly is the Fractional Tapa. I finally gave up on trying to incorporate the 3 by 3 fractioned cells and then the construction went far more smoothly. I put some clues inside the fractioned cells as Serkan said it could happen, so there's a good chance it will. I think it worked out well. I'm happy with the result.
Then we have the Modern Tapa. I have not a single clue why it's called Modern, but that's unimportant. I think I exploited the set layout very well and it's important not to forget the no reflections rule.
Lastly there's the Tapa Balance. I employed a small gimmick in this puzzle as I expect that Serkan might do the same thing. I would have at least if I were to make the test. So pay attention to the puzzle before you get started. I think this one is relatively tricky.

Puzzles can be found below

TVC XI Practise Part 1

Fidgety could be the word to decribe this test. It doesn't have to be, but it could be if you wanted to. A bunch of these variants have a chance to give unique puzzles that will involve a lot of trying without being able to be 100% sure you are on the right path. It's just this feeling that comes out during construction. I've tried to make the puzzles so that there is no need for it though. I'm not a good instinct solver, so I wouldn't want the test to turn out this way.

There's only going to be 3 puzzles in this post as the Irregular Tapa part I made doesn't match the rules for the test. I will try to fix it. I thought I had all rules clear, but it doesn't seem to be so anymore. The Fractional Tapa I haven't really been able to work out for how to design it nicely. I keep running into non-uniqueness for the fractional cells.
The Mad Max Tapa I think worked out well. It isn't like the example in the instruction booklet but has a more regular Tapa feel to it. This type could come out fidgety, where you get very little clues and/or a weirdly shaped grid where you just have to cram a lot of squares in it and hope that your solution is the max number. For this puzzle if you understand the ways to maximise the square count, you can solve it very smoothly.
The Dissected Tapa has some commonalities with variants you have encountered before. It needs very little clues to solve. This one can turn out figety too as it can be unique quickly, even though you can't find a smooth logical finish to it. This puzzle turns logically harder if you were to change the 22 and 6 clues both to a 23 clue, but I wouldn't like to see it in the test this way. This puzzle solves very easy if you get how to open the puzzle.
The Visionary Tapa is probably the best practise out of the 3 as I see no fidgety variant for it. I'm most sure of it appearing similarly in the test. I do think the clue type makes for a challenging solve, where the difficulty of the deductions doesn't really matter. I find it tricky to keep looking at the right distance for the second set of clues.

The puzzles can be found below.

TVC XI

Sorry for the long hiatus. I'd been trying to make something special for puzzle 100, but I have a feeling that is never going to come together the way I want it. Most likely I will just start posting puzzles again and not worry to much about outdoing myself. And if I ever manage to create something special I will just post it as normal, like what I did with my Four Colour Loop.

As for TVC XI, I will again try to post a set of practise puzzles. I've gone over the instruction booklet and I suspect it's going to be a challenge though. Cihan Altay has always been a puzzle maker that can confuse me to no end. You can't accuse him of lack of creativity, but I sometimes think it's going a bit crazy.
It's also a bit how I feel now having read through the instruction booklet.

I have 2 options to post these puzzles. I can again deliver the puzzles in 1 or 2 big batches like I did before. The first batch will then probably come wednesday evening the earliest. I think this is nicest for post count and makes it look more organised. The other option would just be to post a puzzle whenever I finish one. I will probably be a bit chaotic, jumping all over the puzzle booklet as I don't really construct all puzzles in order. I tend to just work on what puzzle type gives me inspiration at the moment. I have posted the puzzles nicely in order before, but that's not the order in which they were constructed. If people prefer me posting puzzles whenever they are ready, I'll go for that but my preference goes to the batching.

I hope to get everything ready by Friday, but I can't promise anything. Just hope whatever is ready will be helpful.

TVC X Recap

TVC X has finished. I finished 3rd and am now the only puzzler to reach the podium on both tests. Ranking-wise I'm doing the best out of everyone. But with each test having one puzzler who outsolved the rest by a mile, the normalised rankings puts me in third place.
I wasn't completely happy with my performance after finishing. I broke the Magnetic Tapa twice and the Toroidal Tapa once. I also had to guess my way through the end of the Tapa Guard, which didn't go all that smoothly. But that probably only cost me the 24 points in penalty I got in the extended time. I don't think I'd been able to get anything from the Tapa Distiller if I had been error-free. It took me 25 minutes afterwards to solve that puzzle and even though you get points per grid by the time you finish one grid you're almost done with the whole puzzle.

As for the puzzles, my favourites were the Anglers Tapas and the Shortest Segment Tapas. I'm not really sure why the Shortest Segment Tapas got such low ratings as I really enjoyed them. In my mind the Braille Tapa was highly overrated. I raced through that one. The Tapa Guard was underrated and i felt was the hardest single puzzle in the set. I obviously also found the Tapa Distiller challenging. That was partly as there seemed 3 places where you could possibly start solving and only one of them was any good to break it open in my mind. Of course I started with the 2 that didn't help much. The Magnetic Tapa was probably my least favourite, but that's just because the Magnetic aspect was a bit too little in my opinion.
I think my Combination, Shortest Segment and Braille Tapa were probably the most helpful for the test. For the Braille Tapa I think the most important thing you had to pick up is studying the letters before solving and seeing what the implications of colouring squares and leaving squares blank meant. I was expecting the Anglers Tapa to have the little loops as well, which is why I put it in my puzzle.

There always seem to be puzzle types returning to the next set. My choices would be Magnetic Tapa and Toroidal Tapa. The Magnetic Tapa I choose because I think I've shown with my second and third puzzle it has a lot more to offer than the puzzle that was in the test. So I think it deserves another showing. The Toroidal Tapa is just because I'm a fan of Toroidal puzzles and it uses the most Tapa thinking. Even though I liked the Anglers puzzle I don't need to see it back as I think the puzzle will probably be very similar as the ones in this test.

Finally I'm posting my Shortest Segment reject. This puzzle didn't match the rules that appeared in the test.


Rules for Tapa

Shortest Segment Tapa

Use regular Tapa rules. Additionally the numbers on the outside indicate the shortest segment of connected squares in that row or column. At least one segment of that length will appear in that row or column, but no segments shorter than the given number.

Click to enlarge

TVC X Practise Part 3

TVC X starts tomorrow. There's been an errata file posted with some clarifications on the rules which should be handy to read before the start. Especially for the Shortest Segment Tapa, it is very important. But if you have done my practise puzzles, you should be clarified on those rules as my puzzle matches the rule. Also the points table has been announced on the forum.
There was a sudden surge of visits to my practise puzzles this morning. That's because my practise puzzles are now featured on the TVC X main page, which is greatly appreciated.

I put out the option for requests for more practise puzzles.The request was for Magnetic Tapa and Combination Tapa, which are posted below.
The Combination Tapa worked out okay. I still think it can all work out a bit cleaner, but it's still not totally a Tapa to me. You don't do much solving Tapa wise as the wall construct is also used in genres like LITS and Nurikabe.
I'm again very happy with the Magnetic Tapa. I had mentioned before how I thought the Magnetic Tapa would probably be in between the first 2 puzzles I posted and this is what I had in mind. There's Tapa clues in the grid, but the puzzles isn't close to being unique by only using the Tapa clues.

Puzzles can be found below.

TVC X Practise Part 2

Here is the second part of the TVC X practise. I think the puzzles worked out well. If there's any variants you'd like to see one more of, I can try to give it a go. I am excluding the Tapa Distiller from this request as it's a bit too much trouble to make. I'd love to know what you think of the puzzles as that will help me in preparing these sets.

The Shortest Segment Tapa worked out well. I made another one, but that doesn't match the rules that will be used in the actual test. I will post that puzzle with the TVC recap after the test.
There are two Magnetic Tapa puzzles. One is a puzzle that matches the instruction booklet. I don't find it very interesting this way as the Magnets influence is very little here. The numbers outside are more needed to get the magnets unique and not the Tapa unique. This means they are mostly inconsequential for the answer key. The second one is a puzzle that uses the magnet clues to shape the Tapa. I really like this puzzle. It's a challenging one. It could be that the actual test puzzles will fall in between these two puzzles. At least you'll have gotten practise in both ways.
The Tapa Distiller is 7x7 because 10x10 seemed a bit overkill. I find these puzzles always tricky as you have to be careful with your deductions. Accidentally eliminate a clue from a correct grid and you'll have no clue where you went wrong. The reasoning to assign clues to grids isn't too hard for this one.
Anglers Tapa is a genre that isn't too bad but I think can improve a bit. I think all anglers being of unknown length might be better or possibly the anglers being in the grid hidden as Tapa clues (so a 15 could be a length 15 angler or a 1-5 Tapa clue). This one I made according to the example. I think it turned out nicely and uses the Tapa more for the opening than the Anglers bit.
Tapa Difference is an okay puzzle. I think it runs nicely. It's not my favourite as many of the clues are known at the start and the Difference bit adds very little to them.

You can find the puzzle below

TVC X Practise Part 1

I will do these practise puzzles in two days. Some of the types don't come as easy as others. I try to put in something that will help learn a bit about a variant, so that it will actually be helpful.

Total False Tapa is still a tricky genre. I think the logic path is better than my previous one.
Tapa Guard is more like the puzzle in the test I hope this time. Last time I was happy with the result, but not completely applicable to the test.
Tapa and Pata is the same puzzle as my Double Trouble #4. I might make a new one, but I find the gimmick very hard to acchieve. Both puzzles are somewhat challenging.
Toroidal Tapa is the puzzle I'm happiest about in the set. The edge 2x2 squares are the hardest to keep track of when solving.
Braille Tapa is not my favourite variant. Somewhat interesting to disallow certain shapes, but it can sometimes be a bit limiting in design.
Combination Tapa doens't always feel like you are doing a Tapa. I'm happy with how I managed to get the grey cells to work out.

You can find the puzzles below.

Puzzle #99: Liar Loop

This month the new issue of Akil Oyunlari has been published, which includes four LITS and four Liar Loop puzzles by my hand. I made more than 4 Liar Loop puzzles  for the magazine, so there was more to choose from for finding the right difficulty.
The puzzle doesn't have all pentomino cages as my previous one. It actually has all hexomino cages and one tetromino cage in the centre. It was a play on one of my smaller puzzles for the magazine, where I used all 12 pentomino shapes and a single tetromino shape in the centre. I think it worked out well.

Rules for Liar Loop

Puzzle #98: LITS; Cube

I know I'm a day late. Yesterday was Valentine's Day. This puzzle I made for my girlfriend, who luckily thinks me being able to make puzzles is awesome. So every year I make a special puzzle for Valentine's day.  This year I made a LITS puzzle on cube. I build the cube out of cardboard as you can see in the picture.
The puzzle for you is an unconstructed cube, which you can fold. The red lines are to fold, but otherwise mean nothing special.

Rules for LITS

This puzzle is on a cube, running over all 6 sides. Normal rules of LITS apply. No corner of the cube can be fully coloured. The pink areas are only for aestetics.

[Edit 19/02/12: Fixed small uniqueness issue in left face]

Click to enlarge

Rules: LITS

This genre was developed by Nikoli.

Colour a shape of 4 orthogonally connected squares in each black bordered region so that all coloured squares form a single contiguous area. This area can't contain any 2x2 coloured squares. Two identical shapes in different regions can't touch eachother by a side. Rotations and reflections are considered the same shape.

TVC IX Recap

So, I finished second, which is my first podium finish on an LMI-test. I think making all these puzzles helped me in doing well. The most use I got from preparing the No Squares and Total False Tapa. I picked up some number patterns that also came back directly in the puzzles. The Tapa line helped see how the path creeps through certain holes. The least useful was probably making the Digital Tapa and Battle Tapa. The Digital Tapa in the test was a bit gimmicky, which I'm never much a fan of for tests. The Battle Tapa was designed around the fleet, whereas I designed the fleet around the Tapa.
I hope others found them useful as well. If people want me to make a set for the following TVC's, I'll give it a go for those too. I just hope the instruction booklet is out a little bit earlier. One or two extra construction days would be helpful.