Broken Sign Blog
#155: Indian Puzzle Championship 2024
23 August 2024I made some puzzles for the Indian Puzzle Championship again!
As last year, 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 once again a revisit of all the categories from the Puzzle Ramayan series (with one genre from each category). I covered the Loops category this year and picked Geradeweg. Pretty happy with how this turned out.
I ended up giving Round 2 a pass this year. The idea was to have a round of “Optimiser” puzzles where the puzzles are non-unique under regular rules, but have a unique solution when maximising or minimising some quantity. Despite many attempts, I just couldn’t figure out how to make a good puzzle with this concept, so I made two puzzles for Round 3 instead.
Round 3 (like Round 6 of this year’s Logic Masters) applied common Sudoku variants to non-Sudoku puzzle genres. I first made a Choco Banana with even/odd clues, which was meant to be flowy but turned out to be quite spicy. I’m not sure if it’s just that the visual theme doesn’t telegraph the break-in enough or if I’ve lost all sense of difficulty for this genre.
The second puzzle I made was a Meandering Words variant. I’ve gone on at length about how much I love this genre, but one thing that’s always bothered me is that the word banks cannot have any words with double letters, which rules out tons of fun themes. So here’s a variant which gets around this limitation: by placing two letters in some cells, we can put the double letters there without breaking the “adjacent cells contain different letters” rule. I had some ideas for making this variant a little more flexible and/or cursed, but I wanted to keep the puzzle approachable here. I might explore those ideas some other time.
Note that the ordering of the letters in a split cell is technically arbitrary (and either order was permitted during the contest), but to trigger Penpa’s answer check, you’ll have to put the letter that appears earlier in the word in the top left corner of the cell.
Rules: Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centres of some cells that passes through every clue. Every straight line segment that touches a clue must have a length equal to the clue’s value.
Rules: Shade some cells so that all areas of orthogonally connected shaded cells are rectangular and all areas of orthogonally connected unshaded cells are not rectangular. A number clue represents the size of its group of shaded/unshaded cells.
A circle represents an unknown odd number. A square represents an unknown even number.
Rules: Place one letter in each empty cell and two letters in each split cell. The letters in a region must form an orthogonally connected chain of letters spelling out one of the words given outside the grid (two letters in a split cell must be consecutive letters in the word). Each given word must be used. Two instances of the same letter may not appear in adjacent cells, not even diagonally, and not even across region boundaries (split cells may contain the same letter).
