World Puzzle Championship Puzzles - Round 6

Round 6 had puzzles that were all combinations of different types of puzzles. There were some interesting ideas, but I doubt many of these will be seen more often again in future puzzle sets.

There's a few puzzles in here that I'm pretty happy with. The Starwacky puzzle is a nice solve. Snail on Snake worked out pretty well because it didn't need any extra given numbers, except for the head and tail. Galaxies and Tetrominoes is my favourite in the set, because it really forces the two types to work together.
The other puzzles should also be nice to solve.

World Puzzle Championship Puzzles - Round 3

I wrote a number of practice puzzles for myself, to help prepare for the World Puzzle Championships this year. I didn't have as much time to prepare, but it helped in the long run. Some people wanted to see them afterwards, so I promised to post them all on my blog.

I only really made puzzles for three rounds on the championship: Round 3, Round 6 and Round 12. This post contains puzzles from Round 3.
Most puzzles were overall a bit harder than the puzzles at the actual championship, because I took a bit more liberty with the design of most puzzles, especially in the amount of clues given. One puzzle ended up being broken, but I guess it still helped in a way to find out the logic in the genre.
For examples, please check the WPC instruction booklet.

UKPA Open 2016: Individual Round

The UKPA Open 2016 was held in Croydon on February 27th-28th. Tom Collyer was the winner of the Sudoku competition, with Mark Goodliffe finishing in second and Heather Golding in third. Neil Zussman won the Puzzle competition, with Tom Collyer finishing in second and Steve Barge in third.

I contributed an individual round for the puzzle event and a team round. This post will contain all puzzles from the individual round. The team round will be posted in a separate post.

Puzzles can be found below.

Puzzle #187: Magic Snail

This is the fifteenth practise puzzle for this year's UKPA Open.

I wanted to include a Latin square type puzzle, but many don't work that well with the digits 1-4. I needed a type that used empty squares to get a workable puzzle. Magic Snail seemed to fit the bill. I used to always have trouble with these puzzle. But since designing a few of these I got a bit more the hang of them. It's important to keep good track of the number through the outside few rows as the ordering forces a lot. It limits the placement of certain numbers in particular cells. This puzzle is not overly hard, although I accidentally sent it out with a missing clue at first. That made testing tricky. With the clue it's not the hardest.

Rules

Write the digits 1-4 once in every row and column (1-3 in the example). When traveling from the left top corner to the centre you should encounter the digits 1-4 four in order: 1-2-3-4-1-2-......-3-4.

Example

 

Puzzle