Friday, 5 October 2012

Friday Puzzles #177

Greetings from Croatia, where it's great to be in the company of the international puzzling fraternity.  Some things never change though, and again I find myself on a Thursday night formatting up a puzzle ready for publication.  The WSC has been and gone and washed me up in 28th place, which I'm satisfied with even if I was aiming to break into the top 20.  There's always next year!  Team UK finished the team competition in 12th, which is modest progress on last years 14th, and all the more creditable in the absence of David McN, who sadly had too many commitments to make it out this year.  I look forward to trying to get one over him at next year's event!

Congratulations are due to Jan M of Poland for taking his 3rd title, and to the Japanese all-star team for running away with the team title.

Anyhow, onto puzzling matters.  My idea was to take my favourite puzzles from both the WSC and the WPC and provide my own humble homage.  I thought a lot of the puzzles from the WSC were if not disappointing, then no better than mediocre, many seemed to have come from straight out the generator.  From an aesthetic point of view, it was a little disappointing to observe a distinct lack of symmetry in the play-off puzzles.  The one difference was a little killer puzzle which was a lot of fun to solve.  Perhaps at this stage I should mention that that puzzle, as well the one below, does not require there to be different digits on the main diagonals of the grid.  Perhaps I should also mention that I've got Neil Z sat across the table test solving, and he hasn't managed to crack it yet.  On that basis, this gets a "hard."  Enjoy!
    #212 Little Killer Sudoku – rated hard

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-12.
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4 comments:

  1. Bastien Vial-Jaime15 October 2012 at 14:15

    Hey Tom,

    Despite all the joking with Fred about this puzzle in Kraljevica, I must admit that it was a fun one to solve. I didn't find it that hard though, but I guess I got used to quickly finding the break-in in such puzzles. Also, thanks for telling me to give a try at the one from round 5, which was indeed one the best sudokus from the championship. I wish I had tried it back then.

    Bastien

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    Replies
    1. Tom Collyer15 October 2012 at 23:21

      So I solved the one Fred put on his blog recently, and I think I agree with you, his is a bit harder. Perhaps there are only a few such gimmicks you can work into a puzzle, but I've probably come across less of them than you. I think this is the first little killer puzzle i ever made!

      Delete
  2. Joshua Zucker1 November 2012 at 04:09

    This one is pretty nice! I like the pattern with all those small digits being forced pretty quickly. I found it satisfying in a rather similar way to the puzzle on the WSC, the way you get all these sets of cells that have a given set of numbers and then finally find the clue that sorts out how they all fall together.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous17 August 2018 at 06:35

    ..13:34..Nice

    ReplyDelete

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