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.
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ReplyDeleteI could say I like all these surprises. Especially the "Evergreens". Unfortunatelly I didn't try some puzzles during the round, but later I had a lot of fun solving them. This round also contained my most outstanding "achievment" - I couldn't solve 2x2 puzzle :). Previously my friends told me about unsolvable 4x4 sudoku in Zhilina, but I couldn't imagine "unsolvable" 2x2 puzzle...
ReplyDeleteThere was one trouble with "Best of ..." round - puzzle names were missing. I even had solved one puzzle using conditions of other puzzle and recognized my mistake when obtained contradiction.
And you don't say about most enjoyable surprise - "Screen test".
Thank you Andrey. You are right, I forgot it. However, there will be a separate post about the Screentest at one time.
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