Polish Puzzle Championships 2014: Individual Round

Last weekend were the Polish Sudoku and Puzzle Championships. The Championship was also open to International solvers this year. The playoffs would feature the best 4 solvers, while having at least two Polish solvers.
The Sudoku playoffs featured Tiit Vunk, Jakub Ondrousek, Jan Mrozowski and Krystian Swiderski. Jakub Ondrousek finish first in the playoffs, followed by Krystian Swiderski, Tiit Vunk and Jan Mrozowski, making Krystian Swiderski the new Polish Sudoku champion. Full results can be found here.
The Puzzle playoffs featured Przemysław Dębiak, Matus Demiger, Zoltan Horvath and Tomasz Stróżak. The final results remained almost the same with Przemyslaw Dębiak finishing first, followed by Zoltan Horvath, Matus Demiger and Tomasz Stróżak. Full results can be found here.

I contributed a set for the Puzzle Championships for the individual round and wrote a team round together with Zoltan Horvath.

You can find all puzzles of the Championships in the following link: Sudoku Rounds + Team Round, Puzzle Rounds. My puzzle set is round 4. This post will feature all the puzzles from my individual round. Tomorrow I will post the Team round puzzles with a special surprise.

Last year's set was a bit on the difficult side, so I tried to think of a way to rectify that this year. I decided to write 2 puzzles per type, one smaller/easier one and a larger/harder one. I didn't want to make any too difficult. I selected 10 varying types of puzzles. I was hoping to average about 1.5 minutes per puzzle on the smaller ones and about 4.5 minutes per puzzle on the larger ones. I had the set tested by Prasanna Seshadri, James McGowan and Stefan Gaspar. The smaller puzzles made that average pretty well, but the larger puzzles were more inching towards 5-5.5 average and all of them had some outliers. I couldn't really decide well which puzzles to cut so I sent in the whole set and let them know that they could leave out a puzzle type if necessary. During their testing 3 of the larger puzzles seem to have cause some problems as they went up in score. I think the set will have worked well none-the-less for all solvers with the easier puzzles to work with as well, but I'd love to hear some feedback form those who were there.

Puzzles can be found below.

Puzzle #32: Castle Wall

Rules for Castle Wall

I don't generally makes puzzles larger than the standard 10 by 10 grids. I like to put tricky steps in puzzles and in larger puzzle they can get lost for people. Castle Wall has more widespread constraints and in a larger grid you can do things that wouldn't fit in a smaller grid. This is a tricky puzzle, which uses two techniques a lot. I haven't done enough Castle Wall puzzles to see how often they appear in other puzzles.
If people didn't know yet, clicking the image gives you the image in the original size. The size discrepancy is a bit bigger in this puzzle.

Puzzle #25: Castle Wall

Rules for Castle Wall

I like how this genre works. I do have trouble making nice puzzles with it though. A lot of times it just won't turn out unique. When it does it usually isn't a very interesting puzzle. I think this puzzle turned out well though.

Rules: Castle Wall

This genre was developed by Palmer Mebane.

Draw a single closed loop through the grid by connecting the centres of cells. The loop can't go through any cells with a bold black border. If such a cell is coloured black, it will be outside the loop; if such a cell is coloured white, it will be inside the loop. Some cells will have numbers and arrows. A number with a horizontal arrow indicates the total length of horizontal line segments in the direction of the arrow. A number with a vertical arrow indicates the total length of vertical line segments in the direction of the arrow.