State of the Blog 12 May 2023
I figured the milestone of 100 puzzles would be a good opportunity to reflect a bit on the blog itself.
I’ve set myself a little puzzle construction challenge. How tall can I make a really narrow Rail Pool grid before running out of ideas? Apparently, the answer is 200 rows.
Uhhh, yes I know, it’s May. I made this set of symmetry area puzzles for a Secret Santa thing last year. I’ve been meaning to put it on the blog ever since, but I kept putting it off. Here it finally is.
Another Gravel making use of an irregularly shaped grid. I’m very happy with how clean the clue layout ended up for this one.
The Kudamono implementation of Gravel also supports non-rectangular grids and holes, so I made a couple more puzzles to explore the possibilities of that.
I figured the milestone of 100 puzzles would be a good opportunity to reflect a bit on the blog itself.
The 100th puzzle on this blog! I didn’t have anything super ambitious planned for this milestone, but I couldn’t just do nothing. And I noticed that it’s been quite a while since I’ve made a vanilla Rail Pool, which brings us to this puzzle.
And finally, we round out this first batch of Gravel puzzles with one that only uses numbers and no circles. I’m really happy with how the theme and logic turned out in this one, that single 1-clue notwithstanding.
To offset the all-black-clues bias of the previous puzzle, I made this one using only white clues.
This was the very first Gravel I made, one year ago today. In this first iteration of the genre, only black, numbered circle clues existed.
Here’s a more substantial Gravel that showcases a bunch of important deductions in the genre.