IHNN's Puzzle Emporium
Tuesday, June 11, 2024
Puzzle #648 - Choco Banana
Monday, April 1, 2024
Puzzle #647 - Four One (Tapa)
Sunday, February 25, 2024
Puzzle #646 - Numbers are Overrated (Nurimisaki)
Friday, February 23, 2024
Puzzle #645 - S is for... (Slitherlink)
I completely forgot I had this old Slitherlink lying around until recently. It was originally intended for PuzzleDuel until I made a puzzle I liked better for that role, and then this one just say in my spreadsheet for months and months, forgotten. There's not even anything really wrong with this puzzle either, it's just a bit plain.
Thursday, February 22, 2024
Puzzle #644 - Two Good (Akari)
Wednesday, February 21, 2024
Puzzles #641, #642 & #643 - Almost Symmetric (Masyu)
Tuesday, February 20, 2024
Puzzle #640 - Fourced (Light and Shadow)
Light and Shadow is still such a good puzzle type. I spent a while toying with this layout of 4s and trying to find any good solution for several white layouts, with all white clues being question marks, before finally finding one. The first version was super bashy and I wasn't going to share the puzzle widely, but something compelled me to keep tweaking it and before long I actually did find a fair, albeit hard variant.
Also, these rules could potentially appear in Islands of Insight, which should launch about a week ago (I'm writing this on January 25th and may not update this space before it goes live). I've worked really hard on that game, especially the puzzle content for the past 3 years and I'm really, really excited for it to be out there for anyone to see.
Sometime around my birthday, I might post a collection of my favorite puzzles from the game. Regardless of your puzzle experience level, you won't be disappointed!
Monday, February 19, 2024
Puzzle #639 - Chained Again (Yajilin)
A few years after the first Yajilin chains on Puzzlers Club (apparently about 4.5 years), the old spreadsheet was rediscovered. Somebody noted that the amount of givens would always be an even number, so... I made a starting point with an odd number, which also served as a way of unsticking the chain, as it must be constructed linearly.
Sunday, February 18, 2024
Puzzle #638 - Too Many Questions (Chained Block)
Saturday, February 17, 2024
Puzzles #636 & #637 - Monkey Madness (Compass Galaxies)
Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!
Monkey Madness is the final level of Ape Escape, taking place first in an amusement park, and ending up in a castle floating in space. The level has 24 monkeys - 11 in the first (bottom) half, and 13 in the second (top) half. It's also huge, taking up 20% of a speedrun, so for the contest puzzle I had to go big. 14x14 was where I started, but was actually too small, so I bumped it up to 16x16. Oh right, the genre choice: I really liked the "one X per region" rule from the Pentominous in So Many Bees, so I brought that back with monkeys instead of bees. It ended up at 40 points, which on finishing pace would be 16 minutes for this puzzle. Interestingly, Ken Endo got here with more time than that and did not solve in time, similar to his performance in Puzzle Zodiac - also arriving at the final puzzle with plenty of time and coming up short. My contests always seem to have a "boss puzzle" at the end that really kicks people around, but it's always a standout and this was no exception: in the feedback I got afterwards, this was the most mentioned puzzle by far.
Rules: Divide the grid into regions along cell boundaries so that each region contains exactly one monkey (shown as a monkey inside a hexagon) and exactly one other clue. A white circle (Spiral Galaxies clue) indicates that the region has 180 degree rotational symmetry centered on the clue. A number in an X (Compass) clue, if given, indicates the number of cells inside that region that are further than the clue in the direction of the number.
Oh right I also had to make an example puzzle. So I did - it's pretty uninspired, but meh. I needed an example and this was the last one I made, and I knocked out all the examples over 2 days to rush the contest out before WPC. But also, I didn't want to re-use ideas from the main puzzle!