Czech Team Puzzle Championship

In the weekend of 7-8 September, the Czech Sudoku and Puzzle Teams Championships were held. The championship was held in Brno. The teams competed in a number of team and individual rounds over the weekend. The Sudoku event was won by the team of Michaela Bieliková, Matúš Demiger, Zuzana Hromcová and Jakub Ondroušek. The puzzle event was won by the Hungarian team of Zoltan Horvath, Pal Madarassy, Major Boglár and Zoltan Nemeth. Full results can be found here.
All Sudokus and puzzles of the championship can be found here. I also provided some of the Sudokus and puzzles for that event. This post will contain all my puzzles.
All my puzzles featured in a single round, together with 2 other puzzles. I hadn't written these puzzles to be a complete round and just wrote a number of different puzzles. It was Karel's idea to use them all together. I chose to write a number of common puzzle types, a number of uncommon and a number of variants of common types. So it's a good mix of puzzles to be featured in a single round. They are mostly puzzle types I had written before, so I knew what to do with them. I'm happy how they turned out and think it was a good mix of easy and hard puzzle.

Puzzles can be found below.

Polish Puzzle Championships 2013

This week is a week full of puzzles on my blog. That is because the last two weekends there were two championships to which I contributed puzzles. Today I will post all puzzles from the Polish Puzzle Championship and Thursday will feature my puzzles for the UK Puzzle Championship.

The Polish Sudoku and Puzzle Championships were held in the weekend of 9 and 10 of March. Jan Mrozowski became the Polish Sudoku Champion. Przemysław Dębiak won the Polish Puzzle Championship. The puzzles for the Polish Sudoku Championship can be found here; the puzzles for thePolish Puzzle Championship can be found here. My puzzles were round 5 of the Puzzle championship. I also found a video of the Polish Puzzle Championship on Serkan Yurekli's blog. In the beginning you can see puzzlers working on my puzzle set. The end is the finals.

For the Polish Championship I employed a copycat theme. The puzzles came in pairs and each pair of puzzles had a similarity in the layout. Most of these types are very closely related in the puzzle type. The only pair that really isn't very close to the other were the Star Battle and Heyawake. I was happy to see that the puzzles were printed on bordering pages in the puzzle booklet, so solvers might notice the similarity.
The idea somewhat accidentally happened. I had made an easy Akari puzzle and wanted to make a harder regional Akari and opted to make one with the same black squares. When I finished those I wondered if I could keep doing that and went with a Liar Loop/Maxi Loop combo as that seemed most easily acchieved. And I'm pretty comfortable designing those, so made two with the same regions. The next puzzles I made were the Capsules and Ripple Effect puzzles, I posted earlier which ended up testing too hard. I really like constructing Ripple Effect puzzles, but clearly not that skilled at making them competition difficulty. I looked through my Double Trouble collection and thought Turning Fences and Slitherlink should be easily made look similar. I chose the same clue positions and about half the clues are the same. I already had 4 Loop puzzles, so that was all of those I could put in. I made a Tapa and Nurikabe with the same clue positions. I at first tried to also make the Nurikabe clues to be the sum of the Tapa clues, but that didn't prove to be very fruitful. I then started doodling a bit and made a Small Regions Star Battle and wondered what type I could use these cages for. I eventually settled on Heyawake as that would allow me to add some clues and see where it goes. The regions were still very restrictive on the Heyawake genre, but managed to push it out with just 2013 as clues. Lastly I needed some Magic Square genres. I thought first about doing Skyscraper/Haido, but figured with multiple similar types, maybe I should try a more different type. So I made a Skyscraper puzzle, to which I added a number of clues to turn it into an Easy as Japanese Sums puzzle. I felt I was somewhat missing a division type puzzle, but I couldn't find a nice way to make 2 that fit into the theme. And when I had the puzzles tested it seemed like there was enough to fill the hour slot already.

I also wrote a LITS puzzle to be used for the finals, except that one wasn't used. It willbe posted at the end of this post.

Puzzles can be found below.

Puzzle #121: Heyawake; Symmetry

I had first seen this variant on Mathgrant's blog. I thought it worked nicely. So I figured I'd give it a go too. It wasn't the easiest to start as Symmetry is always a weakness for me when solving. It doesn't really register with me too well, usually. But then I got the idea to bring back the Antisymmetry label, which I had added to Puzzle #1, but hadn't used since. I always like to build in some kind of antisymmetry in the givens of my puzzles, except it somehow had never come back in any of my puzzles for my blog. So for this puzzle rotationally symmetrical cages with clues have the opposite clues given. This doesn't hold for cages without givens. It would have been cool if it did, but I think that would be awfully difficult to accomplish.
I think the puzzle worked out in the end. The one cell pairs were to fix uniqueness issues, which didn't really bother the solving path. Enjoy.

Rules for Heyawake

Follow normal Heyawake rules. Additionally, this puzzle has no numbers as clues. Instead the clues indicate if a room has 180 degree rotational symmetry or not. An S indicates that the room has 180 degree rotational symmetry. An A indicates that the room does not have 180 degree rotational symmetry.

Double Trouble #6: Heyawake (wacky) and Regional Yajilin

It's been a while since I have done one of these. I had been trying to play around with Ripple Effect/Heyawake and Ripple Effect/Regional Yajilin, except those never came off the ground much. It didn't feel that nice as I had to overload the Ripple Effect puzzles with uneccesary clues to get the other puzzles unique. So I thought that maybe Heyawake and Regional Yajilin might work as they can have a comparable amount of necessary clues. I found it a bit hard to make it work with rectangular regions, so I gave irregular reginos a try and that turned out a lot better. They're both not the hardest puzzles, but I like how they turned out.

Rules for Heyawake

Rules for Regional Yajilin

So firstly this puzzle have be solved as a Heyawake (wacky) puzzle. Opposed to normal Heyawake the puzzle has irregular rooms. The white area still can't span over two or more boundaries, even if they belong to the same room. This one is probably the easiest Heyawake on my blog.
Secondly it can be solved as a Regional Yajilin puzzle. It's not too hard, but it has some trickier steps than the Heyawake, but these are more because of the genre type.

Puzzle #90: Heyawake; Twins

This weekend has been a busy one puzzlewise. It was also a good weekend for me. It was the first time I've done as well as I wanted to do. I won the puzzlefountain competition. At the point of writing this, which is Monday evening, ranked 4th for the puzzle marathon at Logic Masters India, while being fastest for 2 of the puzzles. And I had a good showing on the German Sudoku qualifier even though I lost 10-15 minutes at the start trying to figure out why my printer wouldn't print, while eventually finding out I plugged the USB in a non-USB port. In between that I've been having fun with this month's optimisation puzzle at Logic Masters.de. I recommend giving it a go. It's a fun challenge.
As for this puzzle, it's of medium difficulty. I like the twin concept for heyawake like puzzles.

Rules for Heyawake

In this puzzle, every coloured square shares a border with exactly one other coloured square.

Puzzle #77: Heyawake

This was for a long time going to be a Ripple Effect or Country Road puzzle. But I didn't manage to do with either what I was aiming to do. Then I went to Heyawake as big clues can appear in a limited number there. I tried a few times and this was the nicest that came out of it. This puzzle is of medium hard difficulty. The 6 areas can't be determined quickly, but some deductions can be made to solve the rest of the puzzle, till finally the 6 areas also fall.

6. Heyawake

Paint some cells black. Black cells are not allowed to touch eachother on the sides. The remaining white area has to be connected. The white area can't span more than two consecutive rooms in a single row or column. The numbers in the rooms indicate how many cells are to be painted black.

[Edit: Another uniqueness issue fixed; it's not turning out as a good display of my construction skills]

Puzzle #52: Heyawake

I've realised I have 19 puzzles all ready for people to solve. I figured I might as well start posting them here. I made a puzzle set for the 24 Hour Puzzle Championship, which was held on monday. Now it's over I figure I can start sharing them with everyone. Therefor I'm going to post these puzzles here. This way I can also tell a bit about them, instead of you all just getting the booklet. There will be a few new ideas by me I used in the test and a few ideas I got from other people that aren't actually seen very much online.

Rules for Heyawake

I'm going to open this with a standard Heyawake puzzle. I needed a few more familiar types in the test and this one seemed like a good one to incorporate a nice 24 theme in. I didn't want it to be hard, so I chose some more standard cage shapes to go with the numbers. The 3 by 3 and 5 by 2 cages for the 4s seem to be very frequent in puzzles. I designed the puzzle with those at the start and tried to model the rest of the cages around them. This one is easier than the others I have posted so far. It's one of the lower scoring puzzles in the test, although for experienced Heyawake solvers it was probably a quick pick up.

Puzzle #39: Heyawake

Rules for Heyawake

After a busy weekend, I'm back with a puzzle. I knew I wouldn't be able to keep up posting a puzzle every day, but I kept at it for as long as I could.
I think I'm getting a bit better with creating Heyawake puzzles. This is still not the easiest Heyawake, but I think it has more standard deductions in them than my last one. There's a bit more number work in this one. Hope you enjoy it.

Puzzle #23: Heyawake

Rules for Heyawake

I'm still learning the in and outs of this genre a bit. This puzzle has a tricky opening. I'm trying to now mostly let the cages do the work, which I find more fun in this size. I might try making a larger one, where the numbers do more of the work. Heyawake is one of the few genres I don't mind solving on a larger scale.

Puzzle #6: Heyawake

 Rules for Heyawake

This is probably my weakest Nikoli genre. I have a lot of trouble grasping the logic needed to solve these. I think this one is relatively tricky, but I'd like to hear what Heyawake experts think of it. I could just be missing some obvious things.

Rules: Heyawake

This genre is developed by Nikoli.

Paint some cells black. Black cells are not allowed to touch eachother on the sides. The remaining white area has to be connected. The white area can't span over two consecutive boundaries in a single row or column. The numbers in the rooms indicate how many cells are to be painted black.