This post is a bit late. I never really got around to posting these puzzles. There's some nice puzzle in the set, so I figured I'd still share all of them. I focussed my writing mostly on Rounds 7 and 20. They contained the most types I hadn't seen before.  I also played around a bit with round 13. I think I got the most out of writing puzzles for round 7 as I could actually keep up pretty well with Ken Endo, finishing in second place only slightly behind. Puzzles can be found below. Read more ..read more

It's been four years since I posted on my blog. It's also been four years since I wrote practice puzzles for anything. Most puzzles I've written in the last years have either appeared on the Dutch team website wcpn.nl, Sudoku and Puzzles Down Under on Facebook or in different national championships. This post will contain all practice puzzles I wrote for this year's World Puzzle Championship in Krakow, Poland. The championship itself was a lot of fun. The puzzles were very nice. I was introduced to some fun new puzzle types. La Paz and Rail Pool were definitely my two favourite new types. Thos ..read more

The last set of puzzles are from round 12. This was the innovative round. There were a few types in there that were interesting to write. My favourite two types were Inner ABC and Coral with Letters. I think those are also the nicest puzzles in this set. One rule that popped up a lot in this championship was the "Worms" rule of alternating higher and lower digits within a path of numbers. It's probably not a rule that will be used much in the future. It didn't really strike me as a rule that added much to any of the puzzles. Read more ..read more

Round 6 had puzzles that were all combinations of different types of puzzles. There were some interesting ideas, but I doubt many of these will be seen more often again in future puzzle sets. There's a few puzzles in here that I'm pretty happy with. The Starwacky puzzle is a nice solve. Snail on Snake worked out pretty well because it didn't need any extra given numbers, except for the head and tail. Galaxies and Tetrominoes is my favourite in the set, because it really forces the two types to work together. The other puzzles should also be nice to solve. Read more ..read more

I wrote a number of practice puzzles for myself, to help prepare for the World Puzzle Championships this year. I didn't have as much time to prepare, but it helped in the long run. Some people wanted to see them afterwards, so I promised to post them all on my blog. I only really made puzzles for three rounds on the championship: Round 3, Round 6 and Round 12. This post contains puzzles from Round 3. Most puzzles were overall a bit harder than the puzzles at the actual championship, because I took a bit more liberty with the design of most puzzles, especially in the amount of clues given. One ..read more

This is the 9th practice puzzle for the 2017 WSC. These are the last 2 practice puzzles for the WSC. I'll be focussing on the WPC a bit for the next week. That's the championship where I'm actually competitive. I don't know whether I'll be posting puzzles yet for the WPC, but they might show up. Nine posts also seems the appropriate number for a Sudoku competition. This time they are two practice puzzles for the instructionless round. If someone has any specific request for a puzzle type, I might be persuaded to make another. Let me know. I figured this is a round that might need some p ..read more

This is the 8th practice puzzle for the 2017 WSC. The Joker round is going to be a tricky one. I made an error in the construction of the previous Joker puzzle. Hopefully There are none in these. It's easier to make an error in these puzzles if you just fall back into your standard deductions. This type actually appears twice in the championship as it also appears in the final team round. The first puzzle should be a nice solve. I put in a few things that can be done with the Joker in this genre. I'm pretty sure they were easily figured out by yourself, but I think they're nice to see in a pu ..read more

This is the 7th practice puzzle for the 2017 WSC. I know this round might be a bit contentious to some people. They're afraid it's going to be too puzzly and not enough Sudoku. But just because a Sudoku is named after a puzzle genre, doesn't mean it's completely like that genre. I have a few ways I can imagine these puzzles to be far more like a Sudoku than a puzzle. I tried to design this Sudoku to not heavily rely on being familiar with Japanese Sums as a puzzle. The logic needed isn't much different than a Killer Sudoku. This is one of the ways I imagined the Sudoku element to shine m ..read more

This is the 6th practice puzzle for the 2017 WSC. This is not a very new variant. There's been similar variants, one of them being Shaken Clones Sudoku, where digits have to be the same within certain shapes. The only thing different seems to be that the shape is set for this variant. I haven't solved many of these though, so I figured writing one would be good practice for me. This puzzle is pretty standard. There's not really anything difficult in this puzzle. It just explores the standard things in this genre. If you want a more challenging version of this puzzle, you can remove the 2 in R ..read more

This is the Fifth practice puzzle for the 2017 WSC. I wasn't really sure how this variant was going to work. The example has a lot of givens, so I wasn't sure how it would work from that. I set up an opening section and figured I'd go from there. The opening section actually gave more information than I expected and I managed to reduce the second half of the puzzle a bit. It wouldn't get unique though, so I added an extra circle just to fix a small uniqueness issue. It doesn't make for the prettiest Sudoku, but it's a nice result anyway. I generally like these kind of circle count puzzles, be ..read more