Broken Sign Blog
#106: Polish Puzzle Championship 2023
12 June 2023This year, I contributed a round to the Polish Puzzle Championship (which took place a couple of weeks ago). If you’ve been wondering why I’ve made a bunch of [some wall genre]-Like Loop puzzles in the last few months, most of them were practice for this!
I wanted to make a round of loop genres where I could start with something familiar and then explore new territory. So I ended up with a bunch of loop genres derived from wall-shading genres. There was also one more Coral-Like Loop which got dropped from the round for being too hard, which I’ll be sharing in a separate post.
Note that Canal-View-Like Loop is the ruleset that I ended up calling Grandstands because it felt like it should be a genre on its own, but the puzzle here uses the clue style from Canal View to stick with the theme of the round. I think Alike-Like Loop is also a decent ruleset that could be given its own name at some point.
Rules: Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centres of some empty cells. Clues represent the numbers of consecutive cells occupied by the loop each time it enters the (up to) eight cells surrounding the clue.
Rules: Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centres of some empty cells. Every orthogonally connected area of cells not visited by the loop contains exactly one clue, the value of which represents the size of the area.
Rules: Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centres of some empty cells. Every orthogonally connected area of cells not visited by the loop must be rectangular. The unvisited rectangles must all be connected diagonally. Each unvisited rectangle contains at most one clue, which represents the size of the area.
Rules: Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centres of some cells. If a region contains a number clue, it indicates how many cells of the region are visited by the loop. Adjacent regions cannot be have the same number of visited cells. Regions may be visited any number of times.
Rules: Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centres of some cells. The loop may visit each region any number of times, but visits exactly four contiguous cells in each region (forming a tetromino). If the loop crosses the boundary between two adjacent regions, those regions cannot contain the same tetromino (treating rotations and reflections as the same).
Rules: Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centres of some empty cells. Number clues indicate the total length of straight line segments which start in a cell orthogonally adjacent to the clue and extend away from the clue.