UK Puzzle Association

I recently bought a book by one of the UKPA members.
I won't say who it was, as the book was reduced to 99p from a remainder bookshop.
Enjoying it though, 99p well spent

Thanks Alan, I hope you enjoy it

Hi everyone. I apologise that I haven't been around here much recently - I've been very busy. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, I'm a new father. Austin, my second child, was born at the end of June, and so spare time and sleep have been rare commodities of late. Secondly I've been putti...

I have managed to get it to work by changing both the 42 and the 23 (to 32 and 83 respectively). I can be pretty sure that it was as the original puzzle, as the probability of everything else working otherwise is vanishingly small. Here is the corrected puzzle: ZIPLINE 10.pdf Sincere thanks to Nick ...

Great insight Stefan,
so that means that the mistake (assuming there is only one mistake) must be with either the 42 or the 23, so maybe I can salvage the puzzle after all.
Thanks
Elliott

Thanks Nick I'm fairly sure there must be a mistake somewhere, as I keep meeting contradictions. I placed trivially 1,34,12,7,10,63,33,48,13,100 I traced diagonal pair sums from the 102 at bottom right to place 49 above the 153 on left hand side. Using the same method I traced from the 171 sum to pl...

Hi folks, This a little embarrassing - I made a puzzle a few years ago, and I've lost the notebook that had the solution in. All I have is the puzzle itself, and I'm struggling to solve it. I would have checked it at the time that it had a unique solution that was logically reachable, but now I come...

Alan,
Is it okay if I repost this on the Mensa forum Puzzle Corner?
Elliott

Sounds interesting. And nice and local for myself and Tom Collyer.

By coincidence I recently attended a seminar (for some software that I use in my job) in that exact suite!

I'm hoping to attend. I'll let you know for certain nearer the time.

Hi All

I've attached Mensa Enigma issue 196, less any articles that can't be included because of copyright.

Enjoy, and let me have your thoughts.

Elliott

Thanks guys.

I'll tighten up the rules with regard to revisiting / not visiting cells, and only moving to adjacent cells.

Ronald, I've been trying to make a bigger one, but making a long route where there isn't a shortcut is proving difficult.

Elliott

Thought I'd share with everyone a new puzzle type I came up with. 196 EL stepping stones.doc The rules are very simple, but the puzzles can be quite tricky, (even at this modest size - if I went bigger they could be very tough indeed). The first is reasonably easy. The second is trickier, and has tw...

The two Nurikabe that I made for this issue are my first ever - so I'm quite pleased with how they turned out. I'm also very happy with Forest Map, which is a sort of hexagonal version of Black and White, and Twenty Sum Thing turned out well too I think.

Elliott

PuzzleScot wrote:You mentioned a coupld of WPC Fence puzzles would appear, but I don't see them. Were they just cut for our version?

That's right Alan, the missing puzzles 195.07 and 195.25 are the two fence puzzles from last year's WPC.

Hi all As many of you already know, I edit a periodical newsletter for Mensa Members called 'Enigma'. It's not exclusively for culture-fair puzzles, but even many of the language-dependent ones rely on some sort of logic (like Tetra-Word; and certainly Dice Logic, where language is only required for...

I second that - well done Steve, Simon, Gareth and Ronald!

I've never tried any of Tom Snyder's puzzles before, so I'm looking forward to it. I'm not going to be able to spare two hours at the weekend to do it though, so I'll be going through it at my leisure. Should be fun!

Elliott

Thanks Tom For some reason I'd always thought that a 'set as you would solve' approach wouldn't work for Nurikabe, and that you'd need to know the final arrangement before you started. I tried a 10x10 as you suggested, and ambitiously tried to place the given numbers symmetrically, as Nikoli so ofte...

Nurikabe are my favourite of the Nikoli puzzles, but I've never figured out how to set one.
If anyone has some guidance I'd be very grateful.

Elliott

My favourite was the Nurikabe. But I agree the big Yajilin was great too.

I had said that I wasn't going to try any of these competitions against the clock, as I'm just not at that level yet. So with that in mind I printed it off and sat watching TV with my daughter, but after I solved a few I thought I might as well submit my answers. I solved 9 of the main 18, including...

I've tried this a few times now, with various different sizes, and I almost always hit upon a unique solution, so I'd say it's definitely a good way of making them, and fun too.

Elliott

Okay, so, not one to be deterred, I had another crack at achieving uniqueness from a more-or-less randomly drawn loop. I wondered whether lack of uniqueness was a property of the loop itself, or the parity of nodes I had chosen. So I took the very same loop that had failed to yield a unique solution...

Thanks Steve, Andrey and Nick, I might have known I'd missed something. It's not particularly obvious how you would tweak it into uniqueness either, unfortunately. I still think just drawing a loop and then checking for uniqueness is a pretty good way of creating them, although it has the disadvanta...

Following on from some comments on the 'Puzzles to Inspire Youngsters' thread, I was interested to know whether just drawing a loop and marking every second turn would be likely to give rise to a puzzle with a unique solution. Dr Steve said he used this method to create his examples, and considered ...