Sunday update and solutions
This was our last week of puzzles for 2020. You can find the set of Fillomino puzzles in this PDF and the solutions are all grouped in this PDF and have also been linked to the individual posts.
We have a solving video for the last two puzzles in the week, including Friday’s Catch-13 Fillomino by Ashish Kumar:
and Saturday’s Fillomino (Checkered) by Jonas Gleim:
We also have a holiday gift for everyone, as we have posted all of our solving videos from before 2020 on Youtube (a total of over 100 walkthroughs)! These are linked to the individual posts if exploring the old archive and also captured on this page. These were filmed with earlier techniques, so some have slightly worse visual/audio quality than we are trying to achieve now, but there is a lot to learn by exploring the videos. I will soon have a new document camera to improve my recording even more, and next year may even try some new kinds of videos like blind solves of competition puzzles and also “basic rules and info” videos for the puzzle styles to better introduce beginners to a new style including its history and basic constraints. Tell us what you’d like to see from future solving videos.
We’ll be taking the next two weeks off to organize our Best of 2020 list and prepare for the start of 2021 puzzles. 2020 has been a full (if challenging) year, with me starting a new job in March and having a lot more responsibilities in leading a large team advancing immunology assays as potential diagnostic tests across diseases. But by adding Serkan Yürekli as our Managing Editor, we together got back to posting 30 straight weeks of puzzles, with at least 2 solving videos each week, and also released 7 new books of puzzles. We have a lot to come in 2021, including more books, the implementation of more routine online solving, a new puzzlemaster and more.
I have definitely been enjoying this year of puzzles. It is likely just my imagination but I feel like the difficulty balance has been even better than before, but that could just be a result of having the difficulty labeled on each puzzle.
Also, I would really love to see a “basic rules and info” set of videos. I’ve been trying to get some of my friends into these, but starting off is always the hardest part for them, and while this site has had the highest quality puzzles imo, the difficulty is also fairly high. Having some better explanations could help that. I would also personally be very interested in the “history” side of things, learning where some of these puzzles came from and how they’ve changed over time (the transition from Corral to Cave comes to mind).
Also, while I do print all of these out and solve them on paper, online solving would definitely help to build a bigger audience. A lot of people don’t have ready access to a printer, and most aren’t comfortable with image software to do it digitally either. Giving people something to actually click around on could provide enough engagement to get people actually thinking and solving, who might not otherwise.
Congrats on a brilliant 2020! I have really loved the steady stream and variety of puzzles. Seconding Leo’s suggestion for online solving–I manually create all but the really offbeat puzzles in the penpa software because I do most of my solving on the computer.
If you’re taking requests, I’d love to see some solve videos of standard battleships puzzles. For some reason I just can’t wrap my head around even the easiest examples and could really use a primer in helpful things to consider.