UK Puzzle Association

Ken finishing in 20 minutes is positively inhuman. There were... *checks notes* ... 22 puzzles. Factoring in time for printing and answer keys, you're probably looking at about 45-50 seconds a puzzle, which I think is about as fast as I could do it if I was just copying the answers. Well done to yo...

Round 4 instruction booklet: https://gp.worldpuzzle.org/content/instruction-booklet

Crazy looking round which throws the 40/40/20 split for classic/familiar/novel completely out of the window. Puzzle 8 seems inspired by one of my creations.

Yep - they're screenshotted PNGs from my online tool for creating Sudoku puzzles (the same one used by Cracking the Cryptic). I thought about learning to use either TikZ or something like Inkscape, but I didn't have that much spare time.

Hi everyone,

During my enforced isolation from the world, I have taken advantage of some extra spare time to produce a set of Sudoku puzzles very loosely inspired by current events. I hope you enjoy solving them, if you also find yourself with some spare time. Some of them are quite difficult.

Sam

I think my earlier comment comes across as very harsh and overly critical of people who have worked hard to prepare this contest. If anyone involved in preparing the round reads this, I'd like to apologise, and let you know that I really did enjoy the puzzles. Thank you for your efforts.

While on the topic of formatting... It baffles me that the four puzzle types with dashed grid lines (Domino Search, Pentomino Division, Hitori, Statue Park) all used different styles for the grid lines themselves! Four different thicknesses, four different shades of grey... The Hitori ones were so l...

The thing is, being a total amateur, and knowing that these puzzles in general are for people with a fair share of knowledge in sudoku and the other grid based stuff, so I've set a goal to enter in this contests in a year from now. So I have 12 months to learn techniques and be a better puzzle solv...

Sorry that I couldn't be there this year. I hope everyone enjoyed the Sudoku tournament today, and good luck with the remainder of the Puzzle tournament tomorrow!

After some delay, the results for Round 3 have been published. UK top 3 are as follows:

16. Tom Collyer - 133.0 (57:00)
17. Sam Cappleman-Lynes - 131.75 (58:15)
74. Matthew White - 85

I managed to solve it and got a unique solution, though. Anyway, here's one that I made. I think it's reasonably difficult for its size, and has some interesting logic.

Puzzle_Maestro wrote: ↑

Sun 08 Mar, 2020 1:57 pm

EDIT: this puzzle is wrong, because I misread the instructions for the puzzle. I'll try to correct it as quickly as possible.

Are you sure? Looks good to me...

The IB has some points in it now: https://gp.worldpuzzle.org/sites/defaul ... IB_v01.pdf

Freddie, you star! Thanks so much for taking the time to write that up.

EDIT: So it turns out that these puzzles are called Sukoro in other places... https://www.janko.at/Raetsel/Sukoro/index.htm

Puzzle_Maestro wrote: ↑

Sun 08 Mar, 2020 7:44 am

Some infection puzzles can be found here:

I remember that round... Definitely the worst I've ever done on an online contest. Can anyone tell me how to actually solve Infection puzzles? I seem to remember finding even the supposedly easier ones very difficult.

Round 3 is active right now - it runs until Wednesday so you have several days remaining if you want to take part.

When I looked earlier there was a Sudoku Round 4 booklet, and the puzzles contained therein were exactly the puzzles from David's online test.

Thank you for a lovely contest, David! I enjoyed all of the puzzles, but particularly #3 (Killer & Clone) and #5 (Little Killer & Thermo).

I'd be curious to know what people thought of the hardest Classic. The pattern on 5s, (whether you want to call it simple colouring, finned X-Wing, skyscraper, 2-string kite...) is something that I have a lot of practice at spotting and is very much part of my repertoire. But I normally steer clear ...

Round 3 preliminary results are out:

26. Tom Collyer - 518
37. Sam Cappleman-Lynes - 464
61. Mark Goodliffe - 402

Tom follows up his strong Round 2 with another solid performance here. Well done!

Hello Glenn, Welcome! I hope you enjoy (or have enjoyed) this weekend's competition. I haven't yet taken part myself but I can vouch for David's credentials as a puzzle author and say with some certainty that we have a treat ahead of us. Always good to meet new people who have caught the puzzle bug....

Round 2 UK results:

23. James McGowan - 95
41. Jeremy Kong - 84.3
46. Sam Cappleman-Lynes - 81.8

Like with the Sudoku Round 2 (by one of the same authors), this was much tougher than Round 1. James is joint top among non-finishers.

The instructions for Hungary's Round 3 are live: https://gp.worldpuzzle.org/content/instruction-booklet

Looks to be a pleasant mix of well-known variants.

Thank you David

Onto an actual question about the contest. I assume that the Renban groups are the usual rule, where each shaded group must contain distinct consecutive digits? A pedantic reading of the IB would suggest that it is valid for a shaded group to contain e.g. the digits 1,1,2,2,3.

The apparent link from the contest page to this thread is broken due to the usual issue with the ampersand in the URL.

I am very excited to see this! I had been thinking recently about whether we should make use of our contest engine to host ad-hoc contests sporadically throughout the year (and whether I would be in a position to offer to create one) - so your announcement has made me very happy