Did I ever say my computer broke like a month or two ago?

I think I forgot to say that here. To be precise, it started from like late January to February; fixed it by buying a new hard disk altogether on 21 February, thus having all my data lost. This includes a good amount of my puzzle images (I still work with Excel, yes, and that single worksheet went away), a good amount of Word documents (I usually have my PDFs published elsewhere, but without the Word it’s going to be some pain to rewrite them in case I want to edit–I’m too perfectionist sometimes), and other things.

Lesson: Back up.

Meanwhile, I’ll point you at this insanity. I haven’t matched that in terms of presentation (although I think I made a couple of insane variants, trying to match other works). Sooo… We’ll see if I have time to squeeze out something. Hey, I’m busy with college life + a future LMI test + Mystery Hunt + [insert other things here]…

Puzzle 66: Ring of Blocks

Fillomino Follow regular Fillomino rules.

Expected difficulty Medium • Answer • Solution (196 kB)

Puzzle 66: Ring of Blocks
Fillomino

EDIT: Fixed ambiguity on top-right corner.

God how long has this blog been without puzzles vanilla Fillomino.

Well, yeah. I like Fillomino, but recent Fillomino puzzles I’ve published are all variants. Crazy variants, even. Here’s an attempt at making a vanilla Fillomino again. And yeah, now I’m using 16pt Century Gothic with 32px cell size. I’m not sure why I change the font so much; blame Will Shortz’s Puzzle Master Workout I think 😛

Speaking of crazy variants, remember Fancy Fillomino February? I’m going to do that again, only not on February, less puzzles, and crazier variants. Here’s a few genres of puzzles I’ve made, just as teasers: Operations, Liar Cipher, and Consecutive Rectangles. That’s not counting variants I made myself just for this series (not just reusing previous variants). Hyped up? See ya in end of October. Most likely the series will lead to my birthday.

Speaking of my birthday and puzzles. Remember Deception? Yes, I pretty likely will author another LMI test. I’m attempting for the test to be run on my birthday’s weekend; let’s see.

Deception

Finally finished testsolving that thing.

27 puzzles, in which 9 will be previews. There might be more to replace bad puzzles; in particular I still have one or two genres where all of its puzzles are clocked under 5 minutes. (I want to make each genre to have a “difficult” puzzle.)

Highly variable testsolving times (02:04 to 31:17; FYI, all puzzles are 10×10 (except one which is 6×6))…

…but I haven’t given all the puzzles to other testsolvers (they are currently holding the latest batch of 15 untested puzzles given in January).

Deception on 18-19 May 2013 (third weekend in May). Still tentative schedule though.

Testsolving

So it’s finals, yet I still find some time to testsolve Deception puzzles.

There’s only one comment now: Surveyors Heyawake is insanely difficult to solve, even by me aka the author. I got 31:17 in a standard size 10×10 Surveyors Heyawake, and that’s only testing the first puzzle. A bunch of bifurcations.

Soon I’ll make the dimensions much smaller to allow easier bifurcation. -_-

On a probably related note, Deception is currently scheduled for 18-19 May 2013 aka the third weekend of May. This is tentative though, and might change.