WPC Day 2 End
The afternoon rounds brought the Anthology round, with 20 puzzle types, one that appeared on each of the past WPCs. Many stand out from their championships, but others are just odd selections. For the Turkish year, for instance, the type is "Yajilin" which is not even a puzzle I can place, probably because I think it was only in the sprint round. Turkey had dozens of new OAPC styles, but "Tapa" is the obvious choice. In fact, the comment I've heard from others that the Tetrascope from Poland's year felt like Turkey's puzzle came from how many people were introduced to the style by Serkan the year before. Anyway, having experience with the old styles will make this round potentially a good one for me. Maybe the most interesting idea is the WPC Champions theme where the 9 past champions (whose first and last names collectively have 100 letters) can fit into the grid in some assortment of rows and columns. I find it intriguing that the two years I felt closest to winning, as a 12-letter new champion, the eventual winners Pal Madarassy of Hungary or Palmer Mebane of USA were also 12-letter champions. So even if history had gone a little differently, this puzzle would still have been destined to fit into this round with exactly 100 letters.
Then is "Something Newish" which has some of the odd puzzles like Rural Tourism from the last post. My favorite concept is Fisherman which is a nice twist on the Fishing genre by adding in undetermined boats (dominoes) to block off the grid. There is a huge valued sudoku/easy as ABC/skyscrapers variant as well which suggests I have a big opportunity to gain time in this round. Only the Domino Arrows gives some pause but this is one of two rounds I believe I can finish today.
Then is a very long single puzzle samurai Half Dominoes, which my pre-thinking suggests may be a bit of a sudoku in disguise. With the clues being for 6 or 7 cells, and with no repeat constraints in rows, columns, and diagonals, a lot of sudoku-like eliminations should drive the early placements. At least I hope so. By the end of the day my brain will be fried so I could see myself just as likely to get 100 (with bonus) or something much less.
The day concludes with a "team" round, with a stack of instructionless but familiar puzzles that we have to solve. We'll be splitting these up and solving them as individuals. So not a team round in the sense of working together in a new or different way.
The evening update puzzle is a Neighbour Cards from Something Newish. I tried to build around some thematic clues, and got a hard mid-game that I liked enough to not tweak further. So this might be more like the 21 pointer than the 11 in the round.
Rules: (from WPC booklet)
Place 20 cards (12 in the example) - 10, J, Q, K, A in all four suits - in the grid using the information around the grid, which indicate which cards and suits must be neighbouring in the corresponding row/column. A pair of information about cards and suits given on the same side of a row/column doesn't necessarily indicate the same two cards in the grid.
Then is "Something Newish" which has some of the odd puzzles like Rural Tourism from the last post. My favorite concept is Fisherman which is a nice twist on the Fishing genre by adding in undetermined boats (dominoes) to block off the grid. There is a huge valued sudoku/easy as ABC/skyscrapers variant as well which suggests I have a big opportunity to gain time in this round. Only the Domino Arrows gives some pause but this is one of two rounds I believe I can finish today.
Then is a very long single puzzle samurai Half Dominoes, which my pre-thinking suggests may be a bit of a sudoku in disguise. With the clues being for 6 or 7 cells, and with no repeat constraints in rows, columns, and diagonals, a lot of sudoku-like eliminations should drive the early placements. At least I hope so. By the end of the day my brain will be fried so I could see myself just as likely to get 100 (with bonus) or something much less.
The day concludes with a "team" round, with a stack of instructionless but familiar puzzles that we have to solve. We'll be splitting these up and solving them as individuals. So not a team round in the sense of working together in a new or different way.
The evening update puzzle is a Neighbour Cards from Something Newish. I tried to build around some thematic clues, and got a hard mid-game that I liked enough to not tweak further. So this might be more like the 21 pointer than the 11 in the round.
Rules: (from WPC booklet)
Place 20 cards (12 in the example) - 10, J, Q, K, A in all four suits - in the grid using the information around the grid, which indicate which cards and suits must be neighbouring in the corresponding row/column. A pair of information about cards and suits given on the same side of a row/column doesn't necessarily indicate the same two cards in the grid.