UK Puzzle Association

When doing puzzle competitions, I often end up guessing, and the notation can get very messy if I need to use several "levels" of guessing and want to track the implications of those guesses. (For example, when doing yajilin I either shade or dot cells, then if I need to guess I use X or O instead. If, whilst following a guess-dependent path, I need to guess again, I'll enclose X or O in a triangle. I notate line segments using either ellipses or elongated triangles.) I have thought about using erasable coloured pencils instead, and I thought it would be interesting to hear opinions on whether this would be fair, as I've been going back and forth on it.

On one hand, it seems ok as the effect is similar to using pen and pencil, and/or using light pressure on the pencil when guessing. On the other hand, for online competitions on LMI, the undo functionality is disabled, and I think the reason for this is fairness to paper solvers. Using coloured pencils would have a similar effect (I could note down where/how I guessed, then quickly track back to that point by erasing all marks of the corresponding colour), which makes me think that coloured pencils might give me an unfair advantage over people who don't use them.

What do you think?

As far as colours go, I have blue black and red pens with me generally speaking, and I’ve often found highlighters to be really useful for some shading style puzzles. (I have 4 colours of those)

I don’t think that stationery choices offer that much in the way of unfair advantages - certainly not in the same way that undo functionality does.

I don't have any issues with the fairness of using coloured pencils. I usually only go to colour once I've made a mess of it first time around, but I don't think it's doing anything that various other pencil notations couldn't do, and hence feels like fair game.

Thanks both - having tried it out on the GP last weekend I agree that it didn't seem to offer much/any advantage. It mostly came in handy for shading in at the end of the Statue Park, where I'd guessed and wanted to ensure I'd not inadvertently closed off any unshaded regions - but I could equally have visualised things by outlining guessed pentominoes instead.