Friday Puzzles #122

Wow – an entry on time? Who’d have thought it?

This Sudoku puzzle felt like more of a medium last night, but I think it’s probably like most of my other Sudoku puzzles, disappointingly easy. Anyway, I think this is a great grid pattern and it solves very cleanly indeed.

Good luck to anyone coming down to London tomorrow for the Times “Su Doku” championship – I shall be doing my best to not make any stupid mistakes, again.

There are also a multitude of other competitions going on this weekend too, this time on the interwebs. Maybe I’ll be able to squeeze some time in this weekend to replace my printer cartridge? Maybe I’ll be sick of the sight of any sort of 9×9 grid. Anyhow, keep tabs on all things competitive puzzling via this link: http://forum.ukpuzzles.org/viewforum.php?f=5

All that remains to say is enjoy – and if you are feeling competitive, try for a sub 3 minute solve. If you are feeling really competitive, below 2 should also be doable.

    #152 Sudoku – rated easy
 

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-11

Friday Puzzles #121

Again, I can only apologise for the lateness of this post. Rest assured I’ll be in the country both on Thursday evening, and on Friday, so the next post will be on time.

This Heyawake is the the culmination of a few ideas I incoherently put together at quarter to one this morning. With a larger size, I reckon this could be developed into a more “complete” puzzle, but hopefully there are a couple of interesting quirks with this one. Enjoy!

    #151 Heyawake – rated medium
 

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-11

Friday Puzzles #120

Apologies all, I was away on conference last Friday, and I’ve still not got around to putting up a puzzle. Hopefully you can expect last week’s puzzle up here later on today!

EDIT (Thursday): Well what a surprise, turns out I did have a semi-decent Masyu lying deep in the pile. For tomorrow’s puzzle I had planned to do a Slalom again, but I’m not sure I will have time as I’ll be back on the road. Maybe expect something that next Monday, or else I guess it’ll be something a little more tame if I can get something done today. Enjoy!

    #150 Masyu – rated easy
 

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-11

Friday Puzzles #119

I’m not sure what to say this week. I wrote this puzzle on a bit of a downer last weekend, and it seems nice enough looking back on it now. When test-solving I used what I thought was a “medium” technique (whatever that means) to get it done, but I suppose it’s more than possible it’s easier than that.

Good luck to anyone doing the USPC this weekend. I suspect one fellow blogger, Thomas Snyder is hungrier than ever to secure yet another consecutive title (and I thoroughly recommend anyone interested in doing the test to check out his “better know the USPC puzzle series”), but he should probably keep an eye open for another fellow blogger, Palmer Mebane. This particular blogger will be hoping to keep mistakes down to a minimum!

    #149 Yajilin – rated medium

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-12.

Friday Puzzles #118

So I’m very glad to be able to say that once more I’m a contributor to Gareth Moore’s Sudoku Xtra magazine! If you aren;t aware of this little gem, then permit me a moment to tell you all about it! The Sudoku part of the title should tell you that a lot of the puzzles are indeed Sudoku related, but there are plenty of Sudoku variants included to keep every enthusiast’s appetite satisfied. A personal favourite of mine is odd-pair Sudoku, which I believe is Gareth’s own invention.

However, those who are underwhelmed by the whole Sudoku craze should still pay attention as the Xtra part of the title holds equal prominence. There are several nikoli-style puzzles in each issue, along with some other WPC favourites. And not to forget arguably the most interesting bit, the community section. (Of course I can’t claim to be totally impartial here!) This features a really rich and diverse collection of logic puzzles sourced from professionals, amateurs and experts alike.

OK, that’s quite enough plugging for now! This week’s puzzle is another Suraromu, inspired the puzzle that appeared in the latest issue of Sudoku Xtra, which was about as much fun I’ve had with any logic puzzle I’ve done in a while. I’m not sure this one rises to those standards, but It’s certainly non-trivial. Actually, Suraromu as a puzzle type intrigues me somewhat because much like Numberlink, as the difficulty of a given puzzle rises, so does that puzzle’s susceptibility to uniqueness strategies. This is certainly true of this puzzle, but unlike with numberlink I think I’d suggest to the puzzler wanting most satisfaction out of the puzzle to resist temptation this time around. And I think I’ve babbled on for long enough now, so all that remains to be said is, Enjoy!

    #148 Slalom – rated medium

 P.S. I should remark that I’m not entirely happy with the presentation of this puzzle. There are some squares which share gates, and I thought that during the test solving this might be a little misleading, even if it is at least implicit that every numbered gate has both of its “posts” labelled. My solution previously had always been to employ a convention that there should be no squares sharing gates, but I suppose I got a bit lazy this week. I’d be interested to know people’s thoughts on this one…

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-12.