21: CtC Secret Santa 2024: IST (part 2)

Three more puzzles from 2024's CtC Secret Santa. All new genres basically.

Part 1 here

#20: CtC Secret Santa 2024: CHR (Part 1)

My Santee for this year's installment of CtC Discord Secret Santa happened to be Rook, who I knew as a very good fellow pencil puzzle setter, as well as someone whose tastes aligned very well with my own. This lucky assignment gave me the inspiration to put my genre-bending hat on and go on a little mission. Let me just say that none of the three alotted weeks went to waste while preparing this gift.☺This was my first "real puzzle project", and the proudest one so far.

I'm going to post the resulting nine puzzles (alliterating CHRISTMAS) in three installments of three. The difficulty should be more or less consistent across the board, with some intended outliers on the harder side.

Huge thanks to Stef Liew and Prasanna Seshardi for immense help with testing and feedback!

#19: Norinori

Standard Norinori rules.

Difficulty: [★★★☆☆]

Solve on PuzzleSquare (puzz.link)

#18: Tally Loop

Tally Loop was published on Kudamono earlier today. I created this genre and a few puzzles in January this year. It's a bit silly and kinda hard to set, but I think it has some fun to it. Here are three puzzles I've made back then.

Rules

Draw a loop through centers of some cells that visits all given clues. Numbers on each loop segment must sum up to the segment's length.

Small example:

Solve in Penpa

#17: Clueless Shimawake

I generally don't tweak my puzzles after the first draft, but this time I tried to accomodate some of the CtC testers feedback and see how much I can improve it. There were remarks about a cryptic and unintuitive step, and it took three iterations to make the puzzle smooth enough while keeping most of the interesting logic intact. I should learn to do this with my puzzles more often.

Rules

Standard Heyawake rules. Additionally, any two regions that share a border must contain different numbers of shaded cells.

Difficulty: [★★★☆☆]

Solve in Penpa+

Solve on PuzzleSquare (Penpa+)

#16: Guide Arrow

 Standard Guide Arrow rules.

Difficulty: [★★★⯪☆]

Solve on PuzzleSquare (puzz.link)

#15: Cave

 Standard Cave rules.

Difficulty: [★★★☆☆]

Solve on PuzzleSquare (puzz.link)

#14: Takeoff (Masyu)

 Standard Masyu rules.

Difficulty: [★★★☆☆]

Solve on PuzzleSquare (puzz.link)

#13: Aqre

Rules

Standard Aqre rules.

Difficulty: [★★★☆☆]

Solve on PuzzleSquare (puzz.link)

#12: Clueless Heyajilin

While we're on the topic of Yajilin combos, here's a recent one. I hadn't seen this one before, and the interaction is quite fun even without the clues. Enjoy!

Rules

Standard Heyawake+Yajilin rules. In case you're not familiar, here's the breakdown (simplified for the lack of clues):

• Shade some cells in the grid. No two shaded cells may be orthogonally adjacent.
• There cannot be a horizontal or vertical line of unshaded cells that goes through 2 or more region borders.
• Also, draw a single non-intersecting loop that goes through all unshaded cells.

Difficulty: ★★★☆☆

Solve in Penpa

Solve on PuzzleSquare (via Penpa)