This is just a brief note of appreciation to the authors of puzzles 6 (Yajilin Battleship), 7 (Loop) and especially 17 (Slitherlink (Wolves and Sheep)) in this week's GP. I've (tried to) solve all the puzzles, but these three in particular were just *fun* to solve. It's obvious that great care went into making them.
To elaborate a bit more on my favorite, puzzle 17: Paper puzzles can't give us feedback while we solve them (unlike video game puzzles), and even a puzzle ostensibly named after a theme (like the common "skyscrapers" puzzle type) is rarely truly "about" that theme. But while solving puzzle 17, I actually slightly felt like I was saving the sheep and keeping away the wolves, which was a delightfully unexpected experience in a paper puzzle.
So, again: Thanks for making these puzzles. I had fun with them! :)
Answer
Thank you for your feedback. it's a pleasure to read.
Théophane Garçonnet
Answer
Thank you for your feedback. it's a pleasure to read.
Théophane Garçonnet
Puzzle GP 2023 Round 7 - Overall Feedback
I enjoyed this round a great deal, and even highlighted a few standout puzzles in another post.
However, I also made way more errors in this round than I usually do.
Firstly, I made a bunch of errors because I didn’t check whether a puzzle had bonus rules. E.g. I tried to solve puzzle 10 Pentominous [sic.?] (Star Battle) as if it was just a Pentomino puzzle.
Feedback: Of course this is ultimately my fault. But from a puzzle design perspective, you could prevent hybrid puzzles from becoming visually mixed up with evergreen puzzles by drawing at least one component of each rule from the start. For example, I wouldn't have made that error in puzzle 10 if at least one star was already drawn into the grid.
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Secondly, I misinterpreted the Canal View puzzle by mixing up whether shaded or unshaded tiles were “canal” tiles. This happened because puzzle 6 (Masyu + Canal View) came *before* puzzle 11 (Canal View), and in the former the *un*shaded tiles were the canal tiles.
Feedback: Again, this error is ultimately my fault. But from a puzzle comprehensibility perspective, I would’ve been less likely to make this error if the evergreen puzzles (Word Search, Snake, Kakuro, Canal View, etc.) had come *before* the hybrid puzzles in the puzzle order. Either all evergreen puzzles before all hybrids, or at least all evergreen puzzles before their corresponding hybrids. Example order for the first 6 puzzles: Battleships, Masyu, Canal View, Battleships + Masyu, Battleships + Canal View, Masyu + Canal View.
PS: In the instruction booklet, the canal cells are shaded for illustrative purposes, which made my error with puzzle 6 even more likely.
Apologies, the above comment
Apologies, the above comment can be deleted. It was meant to be a top-level post, not a comment on an old thread.