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.
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.
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.
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.
This puzzle is based on a (maybe not entirely serious) suggestion by user glum_hippo on the Cracking the Cryptic server.
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.
I made some puzzles for the Indian Puzzle Championship again!
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.
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.