Earlier in 2021, Thomas Snyder and Serkan Yürekli from Grandmaster Puzzles constructed a Puzzle Grand Prix round. This week we are taking a look back at those puzzles and will be adding some extra notes on the constructions here.
General Thoughts (Thomas): 2021 was originally going to be a World Puzzle + Sudoku Championship arranged by some North American authors. The pandemic threw off those plans over a year ago, and has made life continue to have a lot of challenges for me as I balance a lot of science job responsibilities including COVID-19 and autoimmune research with trying to maintain this website as a side gig. Doing “extra” things like constructing this puzzle round were going to need help. So I connected with Serkan as a co-author to assemble something different for this year as we continue to prepare for Grandmaster Puzzles organizing future World Championships / puzzle events.
My mission statement for writing any competition is always the same: “Organize a competition that serves as an example for what all other competitions should strive for.” Embedded in that big objective are many of my own viewpoints as a puzzle competitor, designer, and editor.
The competitor goals are primary of all three, as the solvers’ experiences should be most important in this kind of event. My goals there include having a really balanced and fair competition round for solvers. In my view that should include a mix of very easy to moderately hard (not very hard) puzzles. No puzzles should require heavy bifurcation or guessing. A broad set of puzzle genres should be present. There should be minimal “very new” puzzle styles, particularly ideas that would motivate a top solver to do any extensive preparation to learn the style in advance — I view this as “unfair” given the different availability of time across solvers to prepare in advance, particularly for a Grand Prix round in a packed puzzle calendar. And ideally, a fair number of solvers should be able to completely finish the round so that overall skill, not puzzle selection, determines the top rankings. This year, we met all but the last goal really well. Given the compressed time we had to write and edit the round, we were probably ~15 minutes long in content. We did have one person completely finish the round, and a second finish but with an error (congrats to Freddie Hand for his top place and Walker Anderson for second!).
The design goals are usually to show something special within the round structure that makes the connection of puzzles more special. A Grand Prix round is not just 12-20 randomly collected puzzles. It should have something that brings it together. We’ve tried different ideas before, but no idea should be so experimental that it sacrifices the competitor goals above. The idea I had this year was to continue our 5-6 genre structure but identify two puzzle styles within each genre that could be recombined to make a third “hybrid” puzzle. Moreso than just making a hybrid, I wanted a lot of the grid elements from the original puzzles to be reused in the hybrid puzzle. That way, a solver going through the three puzzles together would sense a stronger experience than just three separate grids with no joint story. As you’ll see as we get through this week, there were some fun stories across the grids.
But we probably fell short on the last set of “editor” goals in that the arrangement of the puzzles throughout the competition separated the stories from each other. So this week we’re breaking the content out from the original competition booklet form (which no longer seems to be available online) and giving you the six puzzle vignettes across the week. They represent the five common genres we use on the site (all except for “Sudoku” which has its own Grand Prix structure), adding in a sixth of “Word/Observational” puzzles to get additional styles that appear at World Puzzle Championship Events.
We’ll be adding new stories here with each set of web posts:
Loop Puzzle set (Thomas): This “Triple Threat” set combines the same visual clues across the related styles Yajilin, Castle Wall, and a hybrid combining these. This “Triple Threat” was the last set of puzzles I wrote but ended up being the easiest across all three so starts off this week. I always worried this group might be the most visually elegant but least logically elegant of the set. That is because I wanted a true triple where ALL the numbers and arrows were preserved across the Castle Wall and Yajilin styles (which share a visual style) and only having box coloring lead to three fairly different solves. Castle Wall colors would be preserved in the hybrid version as well, with ~50% of cell colors coming from each component grid. That’s A LOT of constraints. With three dependent grids, any one that didn’t work would require tweaks that affected the other two and potentially compromise the logical flow.
I started the construction with a fairly open grid and two seed clue locations. One key seed was the 3 down column 1 clue, paired with a black cell in R8C2 to have three different openings for Yajilin, Castle Wall, and the hybrid. The hybrid’s need to fill in all the cells but also keep black clues outside of the loop made the three down clue have three different looks across each of the puzzles. Another seed was the 1 right in R9C7 and 3 down in R3C9 which, connected with unspecified clue cells in the two places you end up seeing them, put in both Yajilin and Castle Wall tension. You can’t easily shade three black squares in that 9th column. You also can’t get 3 vertical line paths for Castle Wall with the intersecting 1 right clue in row 9. The hybrid shifts to use one Yajilin and one Castle Wall coloring to differ that corner again.
Everything else came from forward solving from those two seeds, with eventual values and colors for each of the clues coming from whichever of the three grids was least constrained and seeing if something helped at least two of them. This sounds much easier than it was, and I had to undo about two or three ideas all the way back to the initial seeds before this worked. Overall I probably took 6-7 hours to make these three puzzles, far more than usual. But I hope you enjoy the different solves; truly this is a loop genre served three ways.
Shading Puzzle set (Serkan): These two styles can’t use all of the same clues as they would repeat the same solutions. But taking some of the clues from each classic style could make an interesting hybrid. So I needed to choose clues in LITS (Tapa) without changing the clues I used in the Tapa. In the hybrid puzzle I also needed to change some of the regions in LITS; otherwise I would have had a hybrid puzzle that is solvable by very similar logic. So, I knew that I had to change regions to move more freely, using small changes like bringing together neighboring regions. This would allow the final puzzle to look as similar to LITS as possible but solve quite differently.
I wanted to have a host country icon here, as I have done many times in USPC puzzles before. It was not difficult to write a US in the center with LITS regions. I made them just one unit wide, so the letters U and S didn’t cause too much trouble in setting a single tetromino placement compared to the challenge you can get as a designer from much larger regions. My other goal was to preserve these areas in the final puzzle no matter what, to make them visible in the same place. Even though I chose to split the letters U and S in the last puzzle, the US continues to be clear. In the grid, the last puzzle was easier than I expected, as there are too many constraints.
This group was the one I created in a shorter time than the other two groups. But of course, although it was short, I still put a lot of effort into it. I spent about 22-27 hours for three groups of 9 puzzles in total.
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