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.

Puzzle Competitions: ZeKa 2014

Last weekend was the ZeKa competition in Croatia. It featured both a individual and a team competition this year. The individual competition was won by Goran Vodopija; Marko Obradović and Dragan Tolomanoski finished second and third respectively . The team competition was won by Dragan Tolomanoski, Bojana Vojnović and Vanja Fornazar.
I provided one of the Team rounds this time. The theme of the round was Imposters. The round consisted of four classic puzzle types. Each type had 4 puzzles, where one of the puzzles was an Imposter. It wasn't actually solvable as that puzzle type, but was solvable under a different set of rules. The rules of this puzzle was provided. The imposters weren't designed to be logically deduced, but purely intended to break down under the original rules.
The four puzzle types were LITS, with Double Back as imposter; Shikaku, with Corral as imposter; Skyscrapers with Haido as imposter; Slitherlink, with Turning Fences as imposter. Two of these combinations have appeared on my blog as a Double Trouble puzzle. One of them appeared as such on Grant Fikes' blog. The other is probably possible as a Double Trouble puzzle, but haven't tried that yet.

Puzzles can be found below or in the following PDF.

Double Trouble #8: Skyscrapers and Haido

Haido is a puzzle type that I've recently come across a few times again. It showed up in a recent Skyscrapers contest hosted on Logic Masters Deutschland and the latest Akil Oyunlari magazine. All puzzles I've recently solved were really nice. So I tried making a few and found them more interesting to make than I at first thought they would be. When I saw the results, I thought they all look exactly like normal Skyscrapers puzzles. But they never solve uniquely as a skyscrapers puzzle. Usually they don't even have a valid solution.
So this led me to try to design one that worked as both. I found it hard to find an opening that worked nicely for both. so I cheated a bit with introducing a 6 clue for the skyscrapers puzzle, which is meaningless in the Haido puzzle. I like how they both turned out, although they are challenging.

Rules for Skyscrapers

Rules for Haido

Firstly this puzzle can be solved as a regular Skyscrapers puzzle. This is a hard puzzle.

Secondly it can be solved as a Haido puzzle. It is harder than the skyscrapers puzzle. I haven't solved any that are this difficult.

Rules: Haido

Haido is a genre based on the Skyscrapers genre.

Place the digits in the given range once in every row and column. The digits represent skyscrapers of that height. The clues on the outside indicate that the building of this height is visible in that row or column from that side. Larger skyscrapers block the view of smaller ones.

The example uses the digits 1-4.