Broken Sign Blog
#108: Indian Puzzle Championship 2023
16 June 2023I also contributed some puzzles to the Indian Puzzle Championship. This time, I didn’t make a full round, but instead made some puzzles for every round.
Before I talk about my own puzzles, I want to mention that Logic Masters India are operating the IPC and ISC at a loss each year. To recoup some of the costs, they are selling the complete sets, plus Puzzle Ramayan/Sudoku Mahabharat playoffs, team solving puzzles and a couple of supersized bonus puzzles, for a very low price. If you enjoy the puzzles you see here, be assured that the rest of the set are just as good and consider supporting LMI with a purchase.
More information for purchasing these packs can be found here for IPC and here for ISC.
Round 1 was a revisit of all the categories from the Puzzle Ramayan series (with one genre from each category). I picked LUZ Loop from the Made-In-India section. It was quite challenging to construct a nice LUZ Loop with my self-imposed constraint of having no adjacent clues, but I think it turned out really well.
Round 2 also revisited all of the categories from Puzzle Ramayan, but this time using genres that didn’t appear in the series. I called dibs on the loops category and initially made a Remembered Length. We decided that it turned out too difficulty, so I replaced it with a very approachable Castle Wall. You’ll get a touched up version of the Remembered Length in a separate post.
Finally, Round 3 consisted of six sets of six small puzzles, and six large puzzles. While this was not a requirement, the way it worked out was that six of the contributors each made one small set and one big puzzle. I ended up repurposing Remembered Length for the small set, because those were supposed to be a little punchier, and made a big flowy Rail Pool as my large puzzle.
Rules: Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centres of some cells passing through every circle. The loop turns on circles marked with L and goes straight through circles marked with U or Z. When it passes through a U it must turn in the same direction on each side (forming a U). When it passes through a Z it must turn in opposite directions on each side (forming a Z). There is no restriction on the distance a segment travels after passing through a U or Z before turning.
Rules: Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centres of some cells. The loop may not enter outlined cells or cells containing clues. White cells with outlines must lie inside the loop, while black cells with outlines must lie outside the loop. Grey cells may either be inside or outside the loop. A number represents the sum of the lengths of loop segments in the indicated direction.
Rules: Draw an oriented, non-intersecting loop through the centres of all cells. When crossing a boundary, the number clue in the previous region (if any) indicates how many cells the loop visits before crossing another boundary.
Rules: Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centres of all cells. Some boldly outlined regions contain number clues. If a straight loop segment visits any cells of a clued region, its length must match one of these numbers. Each number must correspond to at least one such loop segment. Question marks represent any positive integer, but numbers cannot repeat within a region.