Puzzle #193: Greater Wall

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 four Greater Wall puzzles. It's my own genre and I still had a lot to play with in this genre as it's still fairly new. That's why I wanted to include it. The first three were the original puzzles I had written, but in the end they were replaced with three other easier puzzles. The fourth was not used as a replacement. The puzzles used in the test all had more straightforward openings. In these puzzles, the openings are a little more complicated. They still given enough information for an easy start, but it needs a bit more effort to get through it completely. Puzzle 2 and 4 use the same opening clue, but the first one is harder to get through.

Rules for Greater Wall

Colour some cells to create a single orthogonally connected wall. The wall can't cover any 2x2 area anywhere. Where given, clues outside indicate all connected blocks of shaded cells in that row or column, in the correct order. Relations between two placeholders apply to the lengths of the corresponding blocks.

Puzzle #1

 

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Puzzle #2

 

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Puzzle #3

 

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Puzzle #4

 

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Polish Puzzle Championship 2016

Last weekend were the Polish Sudoku and Puzzle Championships. Jan Mrozowski won the Sudoku event and Przemysław Dębiak won the Puzzle event. You can find all the puzzles in the following links: Sudoku and Puzzle. My puzzles are round 2.

I provided one of the rounds for the puzzle championships. I've kept the same structure that I've used for the last two year with a smaller, easier and a larger harder puzzle of each type. I think it works well for these championships. I've been trying to run through different genres each year. So this year I again used nine different genres. I think it resulted in a good mix of different types.

Puzzles can be found below.