Here’s another puzzle from my WPC preparation. It’s six individual puzzles that are linked by outside clues. For rules, please refer to the WPC instructions, or read the brief but complete rules on the Rätselportal: Roundabout (WPC 2019).
Here are a couple of puzzles of widely varying difficulty that I made for the hybrid type Standard / Touching Slitherlink that featured in Round 8 (Twilight) of WPC 2019. I could have sworn this variant existed somewhere on the Rätselportal or in the Logic Masters archives, but I couldn’t find it. It’s quite similar in some ways to related hybrids like “Außen-Knapp-daneben-Rundweg”, but has some quite novel features.
Edit Added a clue to the 3s-puzzle to save the intended break-in.
Rules Draw a loop by connecting grid points as in standard Slitherlink. Clues inside the loop act as standard Slitherlink clues (i.e., they count adjacent edges that are used by the loop). Clues outside the loop count how often the loop visits the boundary of the cell, as in Berührungsrundweg (e.g., a clue 4 means that the loop uses all of the cells corners but none of the sides).
Or see the instruction booklet.
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The 28th WPC and 14th WSC took place in Kircheim, Germany last week. The outstanding results from my point of view were Ken Endo’s surprise win of the WSC individual competition, and Philipp Weiß’s amazing win over Ken Endo of the WPC individual competition. Congratulations! My own individual performance was rather disappointing, with offical ranks of 43 (sudoku) and 17 (puzzles), rarely feeling that I was puzzling at speed.
And then there was the WPC team competition, where Michael Ley, Hartmut Seeber, Philipp Weiß and I won the silver medal with a nominally weaker team than in past years, missing out on the likes of Sebastian Matschke, Markus Merker and the Voigt brothers. In a very exciting team playoff (for the players, at least – I don’t know how much the crowd saw), we came from behind to do well on the team puzzles, overtaking Japan and Slovakia and managing to hand in an intuited almost-solution to the final Slitherlink puzzle in the last seconds, giving new world champion USA a proper scare. They were a good half-way through their final Fillomino puzzle at that point – saved by the bell! Congratulations to all the teams, particularly team USA for a deserved win.
Some results can be found on the tournament website, though at the time of writing, the team playoff results are still missing.
I doubt I’ll analyse this championship in as much detail as last year, but expect a few of my preparation puzzles over the next few weeks. At this point I’d like to extend a big “thank you” to organizers and authors for a very well done set of competitions.
Maybe Puzzles 