Broken Sign Blog
#159: WPC '24 Practice Puzzles
20 October 2024Sadly, 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.
Rules: Place the given shapes into the grid so that no two shapes are adjacent to each other (but may touch each other at a point), and the remaining unoccupied cells form one connected group. The shapes may be rotated or reflected before being placed in the grid.
No two unoccupied cells in the same row or column may contain the same number.
Rules: Place some (not necessarily all) of the given shapes into the grid so that no two shapes touch each other. Cells with arrows may not be occupied. Arrows in a cell indicate all diagonal directions where an occupied cell appears closest to the cell (ignoring any orthogonal directions).
Rules: Shade some cells so that no two shaded cells are adjacent and the unshaded cells form one connected group. Numbers with arrows in unshaded cells indicate the number of shaded cells in the indicated direction from the cell. Such clues in shaded cells give no information.
Rules: Draw a non-intersecting loop that passes through centers of some empty cells, travelling between adjacent cells only. No two adjacent empty cells may be both unused by the loop. Numbers in grey cells indicate the number of unused empty cells adjacent to the cell.