Schedule for Next Week
A PDF of the recent guest contributors’ week can be found here.
This upcoming week features puzzles from Jamie Hargrove, one of our super grandmaster patrons who has recently gotten into puzzle construction. The week is themed around two puzzle genres, Nurikabe and Yajisan Kazusan, and begins harder than usual.
Our supporters will also be receiving a bonus Yajisan Kazusan by Prasanna Seshadri, access to puzzle solutions, and a video walkthrough of the Thursday puzzle. If you’d like to receive some of these special rewards, please click here for more info.
With the US Puzzle Championship and other summertime activities coming up, our next week of puzzles will be in two weeks with another style from The Art of Puzzles 2 being debuted.
On a semi-related note, congrats to Dr. Sudoku for his performance on the US Sudoku Championship. Well, performance is putting it lightly. “Domination” might be a better term.
Gearing up for a return to competition I take it? Are we potentially going to see a “seven-time US puzzle champion” in the near future?
Thanks, and best of luck and skill to everyone competing today in the US Puzzle Championship.
You named the style featuring in the next set in a Patreon post. Just want to note I’m really looking forward to it. I find even the puzzles of this particular type that are generated automatically by Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzles are pretty satisfying, so I’m really looking forward to seeing what artful human constructors can do with it.
(While on the subject: Portable Puzzles also does a nice automatic composition job with slitherlinks (“Loopy” in Simon’s terminology) on unusual shaped grids. It’s of course unsurprising that for the most part generated puzzles get boring; it’s interesting to me that for a few types it seems to work well.)
I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts after sharing the book — this is a hard style to “over-design” when constructing by hand, so it may not have as large a gap from automated generation (the Doubled form does offer more opportunities in my experience).