WPC Part13 - Innovatives, Japanese Number Castle

I can't give so many information about this puzzle. When I created some Invasion puzzles (Part2, Puzzle 9) I recognised that I can use these shapes as building blocks.
My first puzzle was too hard, so I created an easier, and we used that on the WPC. Now I publish the first one.

Japanese Number Castle

Build a single connected castle from the given building blocks, according to the following rules. Triangle shaped blocks are fully supported from below (a triangle does not provide support upwards). Right triangles have both their legs either connecting to other building blocks or stand on the ground. Right triangles may be rotated any possible way, while equilateral triangles can only be built in as roofs, i.e. being fully supported from below.

Numbers outside the grid denote block groups in that row/column and the value of each such block. Two blocks are separated by at least one completely empty cell.

oooo

One more puzzle from this genre from Palmer Mebane: WPC practise puzzles.

Don't forget the Christmas Contest is still running until 6th of January. You can find the puzzles in the previous post.
I hope I will get some submissions in this week :)

Christmas special

This small Christmas Contest contains eight different puzzles with similar looks.
I found this puzzle types in the following puzzle blogs:
Para's Puzzle Site
The diary of a puzzlemaker

If you don't know the corresponding puzzle type, click to its name and you can read the rules. And you can find more puzzles from this types on those blogs.

You can send me the answer with using the application form on the bottom of page.

In each puzzle the solution code is the two main diagonals. I have no requirements you can use whatever format, what I can understand. Please use a simple and meaning answer system.

Filling of email address and rating is optional. If you provide me an email address I can reply you, if your answer is wrong.
I'd appreciate that you fill the rating rows.

NOTE: The formhas dead after some days, and I don't know why. You can send me your solutions in email:

ifjutitan.it[at]gmail[dot]com

You can send more solutions in one letter.
The suggested form is:

Nickname: 

Puzzle:

Top-left to bottom-right diagonal:

Bottom-left to top-right diagonal:

Email address:

Rating:

Difficulty: Very easy, Easy, Avarage, Hard, Very hard

The puzzle is: Very nice, Nice, Avarage, Not very nice, Not nice at all

Comment:

There is no price, but I will create a glory wall for participants.
The long of the contest is two weeks. Last submission is possible on 6th of January, 2012.

MERRY CHRISTMAS
&
PLAY TOGETHER!

All puzzles in pdf format.

LITS	Ripple Effect

Heyawake	LIliTS

Double Back	Double Back Tapa

Pentomino Areas	Star Battle (with 2 stars)

WPC Part6 - Board games, Pentomino with Tapa clues

In generally I don't write too many details about the rounds, the needed information is available in the Instuction Booklet on WPC/WSC site. I can't do this now, because we didn't get information in time about this round. 
Some years ago in the 13th WPC (2004) there was a similar situation, in one of the team rounds we had to solve some issue of a Slovakian(?) game. Gyorgy said that there was a little debate about this round between the captains. So we tried to avoid this situation.
This round was on the 5th day of the event. On the previous days it was possible to play with some Piatnik's game and buy them. We didn't want to give advantage to some team. (For instance which participanted on the WSC and not just on the WPC.)
The IB of this round isn't available on the offical site, so I uploaded it: IB of WPC Part6

When we visited the Piatnik's exhibitor office we chose some game which seemed to be good for our aims. At least two games cointaned tetro or pento pieces. The Callisto was a bit strange, it cointaned full set trimino, tetromino and just some pento pieces. But the blocus has four full set pentominoes. It seemed a better choice.
I wanted to create a special pentomino puzzle for this round. The story started before the Hungarian Puzzle Championship. I organized a team game, with some linked puzzles. The main puzzle of this game was a pentomino variation.

Pentomino with Tapa clues

Place all twelve different pentominoes into the grid so that they cannot touch each other, and cannot overlap the clues. Number/s in a cell indicate the length of black cell blocks on its neighbouring cells. If there is more than one number in a cell, there must be at least white cell between the black cell blocks.

Two puzzles from this type.

I showed this puzzles to Para who is a big fan of pentominoes. He suggested me to allow the touching at one point, because this fits better in the Tapa rules. I created a puzzle with this rule:

(EDIT: The oroginal puzzle had more solution, I fixed it.)


The end of the story isn't a happy end. The Piatnik finished the selling of Blocus, hence we had to find an other puzzle. So we chose the Callisto.

An unrelated thing: I will publish some puzzles as a small Christmas contest. I'm not sure that I will have enough time on 24th, so I publish the puzzles tomorrow somewhat before 16.00 CET (this means in the next 25 hours :-) )

WPC Part3 - Cows, Simple Star Battle

I read some criticism about the name of this round. So let's see the full story.

I saw the standard Star Battle puzzle on the Dutch Puzzle Championship in 2003, some month before the WPC. (It was in Arnheim.) The organizers called this type Star Battle on the WPC, and this was one of the novelties. I dont remember that when I saw this puzzle on the DPC it was English or Dutch language.

I spoke about the standard variant, but I had already known this type.  I wrote last time Erich Friedman's site, there was another popular site in these years: Tim Peeter's puzzles.

The booklet-04 contains a really interesting puzzle with name of Cattle. And the description speak about farmers and cows. The puzzle is relativly easy, you have to mark some squares, but the carnish really nice. Regions as corral, and marked cells as cows in the corrals. I can declare I like the creative puzzle names.

When I created my first Star Battle puzzles after the WPC I used the translate of Cows. Hence this is the usual Hungarian name of type. However, this wasnt enough reason why we should use this name in 2010. I knew Star Battle is current, and I dont like to change without good reason.

When we collected the possible Star Battle variants we had a little problem. How can we interpret the Cows and Bulls puzzle with stars? Stars and planets? This is so far-fetced. Moving Stars? More worst.

The only Hungarian World Champion (Pál Madarassy) suggested we should use the Hungarian name, bacause this is a Hungarian Championship. This wasn't an easy decision, but finally we chose this alternative.

In this week I would like to present one more Star Battle variant, which we didnt use on the WPC.
This was the least of all Star Battle, because it doesn't contain regions.

Simple Star Battle

Place some stars in the grid so every row, column will contain 2 stars. The stars cannot touch each other, not even diagonally.

Puzzles by Gyula Slenker

Four puzzles from this type.

One of these:

Each puzzle solvable logically.

WPC Part2 - Assorted puzzles, Banknotes

In this week I choosed a simple puzzle. The Banknotes is one of my favourite puzzles.
When I started the puzzle solving there weren't so many puzzle site than now.
Mayba Erich Friedman's site was the most popular, leastwise in Hungary.

In the last year I rediscovered this site. I tried to solve the puzzles again which I loved many years ago. One of these was the Banknotes.


Rules:
Locate five 1x3 banknotes in the grid, without overlapping each other. Banknotes have different values from 1 to 5. Clues outside the grid indicate the sum of all banknotes in the corresponding direction.



I always liked the small grids with different difficulty.The other good property of this genre is that it is solvable logically in the most cases.
I tried to propagate this puzzle in the last two year. I put some puzzle into the WPC program, but this was just the last step. Earlier I put two puzzles to my 24 hours puzzle set. I sent more puzzles for the Akil Oyunlari magazine, and I created a full page for my hungarian logic puzzle site.
9 puzzles, all of them solvable without trial-and-errors method.
Banknotes puzzles

I solved my puzzles again, and it was a hard choice, but the nr.590 is my favourite.

I hope you will like this genre as me. Have fun!

WPC Part5 - Evergreens, Mastermind

We like the surprises and jokes. In 2005 we had 2 surprise rounds on the WPC.
The Evergreens round, which contained 5 weel-known puzzle genres (Nurikabe, Minesweeper, Four winds, Tents, Loopfinder). Before the round we didnt share the information that the puzzles are located on a surface on a cube. The second surprise was the last team round, the Jigsaw puzzles. In this round the teams had to solve a more or less normal jigsaw puzzle, but the picture was the photo which we made just days before.

In this year we again searched the ocassions where can we play a joke.
The first surprise was the Evergreens round. We didnt use cubes now, all puzzle was solvable on the paper. We used the well-known puzzle genres with the typical describtion and sample but there were some twist in the puzzles!

The first puzzle which I will speak in this blog the Mastermind puzzle.
Instead of numbers or letters the hidden code consisted black and white circles. Can you imagine the surprise faces when they sighted the 8 black and white circles on the left side and the other 6 or 7 circles on the right side? :-)
But this wasnt the only interesting thing in this puzzle. The solving method is different than the usual because of the low number of used symbols.

The puzzle wasnt especially hard, its worth was 35 points, and eventually 46 people solved it. This was the 9th (from 16+1) most solved puzzle in this round.

There wasnt too easy to create a puzzle with unique solution. I didnt want to use an extra restriction. The first attempt had many solution because it was possible to use a grey or red circle next to the black and whites.
I publicated this puzzle here. Fortunately the PuzzlePicnic's software claim the range of possible numbers.

 Aftert this short interlude I finish the list of surprises.I think the Part10 caused a smaller wonder. This part consisted 15 Divide and Conquer puzzle. It looks like Fillomino puzzle but just for the first time. I created 14 puzzles for this round and I tried to exploit the possibilities. For instance there were some puzzles without given numbers inside the grid. Not a typical Fillomino puzzle :-)

Finally, the last surprise was the Best of... round which contained 77 really eays puzzles. The solving time was one hour.

Did you like this surprises? Let me know.

Statistics about the WPC

In this first post I would like to share some numbers about the WPCs.

As you can see we created an awful number of puzzles in this year. ( +77 means the special Best of... round)
I dont want to comment this fact now, maybe this wasnt the best decision. If you have opinion please write down :-)
The second fact that this was one of the longest event. The last hungarian WPC was a bit short, so I hope now we could live down :-)

Number of created puzzles by the authors:
Zoltán Horváth --  88 + 41  (46.4%)
Pál Madarassy --  31 + 3    (12.2%)
Gyula Slenker --   22 + 10   (11.5%)
Zoltán Németh --  20 + 12   (11.5%)
László Osvalt --    11 + 6
László Mérő --     14 + 5
Zoltán Gyimesi --  6
Károly Kresz   -- 6
Boglár Major  -- 2

Finally, the question of the week: Which was the most memorable round of the WSC/WPC? I count on your comment :-)

About the blog

Dear Reader!

Just some words about my aim with this blog.
I would like to provide puzzles which are similar than I created for the WPC (and WSC). I want to share a part of WPC-experience with this puzzles.
I will comment the puzzles and rounds as well.

I hope this will be interesting and I can help to understand the working of a WPC and the organization of a WPC.

If you have opinion about the blog, the puzzles or my theories please dont hesitate and shere with us :)

About me:
My name is Zoltán Horváth (On the internet I use the Valezius nickname.) and I am one of the puzzlemakers and organizor of the last WSC/WPC.
I started the puzzle solving in 1999 when I was 13, and I created my first puzzle set in 2001 for the 2nd 24hours championship.
I created puzzles for a hungarian magazine until 2009.
Now you can find my puzzles in various places.
For instance in the Akil Oyunlari, or on the Puzzle Picnic site.
I have a hungarian puzzle site with more than 800 puzzles from hungarian puzzle makers: www.logikairejtveny.5mp.eu
and a new hungarian sudoku blog: www.sudokuvarik.blogspot.com

I will upload a new post on every Thursday which contain my puzzle. And sometimes there will be an other post with guest puzzles on various days.