Constructing the Twisted Tower

After spending the better part of my free time of the last three months on making the Twisted Tower I wanted to talk a bit about the process. This post contains some vague spoilers for the tower’s solve path and a photo of the solved tower. It’s also very long.

#160: Twisted Tower

Last weekend, the German puzzle community met up for a puzzle weekend in Kassel and I made this puzzle as a team event for the occasion.

#159: WPC '24 Practice Puzzles

Sadly, I couldn’t make arrangements to attend the World Puzzle Championship this year. But I still wrote a few practice puzzles for the German team, which I’m sharing here.

#158: Nurimisaki (Dominoes)

I made the first puzzle in this set for a speed setting contest on the CtC server (and won!). After seeing how strong the ruleset is, I wanted to try and make a big and really empty puzzle which led to the third puzzle in the set. And finally I wanted to round out the set with a puzzle where clues were doing a bit more work in the centre of the grid.

#157: Icelom / Pentopia

This puzzle is based on a (maybe not entirely serious) suggestion by user glum_hippo on the Cracking the Cryptic server.

#156: Chocona

I made a puzzle for this month’s prompt on the Cracking the Cryptic Discord server. The Halloween-inspired prompt was “Shady Tricks”, so I made a perfectly normal Chocona.

#155: Indian Puzzle Championship 2024

I made some puzzles for the Indian Puzzle Championship again!

#154: Sudoco Banana

In an unexpected turns of events, I made a Sudoku in about an hour for a speed setting competition on the CtC server and even managed to get second place. Of course, I couldn’t help but make it a hybrid with my favourite genre.

#153: Fire Walk

The floor is lava.

#152: Triangular Snake

In the GAPP (Genuinely Approachable Pencil Puzzle) series on the CtC Discord server, we have a bit of a tradition called Strange-Shaped Sunday where we tend to post puzzles on non-square grids. For a recent Sunday puzzle, I stumbled upon the idea of trying out Snake on a triangular grid and it worked out so well that I decided to make a few more puzzles for this ruleset.