Could you explain how the extra time and penalties work?

The contest length is 75 minutes, however you can submit after 75 minutes, upto 80 minutes. This 5 minutes is "extra time" or "grace period". A penalty will be imposed if you submit during extra time (irrespective of whether the puzzle is correct or not). The penalty amount will be announced before the contest starts. For your reference, we used 5 points per minute in TVC XIII and 15 points per minute in TVC XVI.

The timer in the submission page will have two components. The extra time will be in red color. Additionally, you will also be able to see how much penalty you will get if you submit right at that moment.

Normal timer


Timer during grace period

Come on. I don't want to actually have to defend my title. Can we just cancel this? ;)

In Tapa Borders will the size of the square be known in the puzzle booklet or do you have to work that out?

:) eheheee, You must :) Will you prepare practice puzzles and share with others in your blog, as you made before?

Yes, we will give the size of the square in the puzzle booklet.

Clearly he should continue this winning strategy.

Ahahaha this is good one :)))) I never thought like that. Yeee, I'm getting now why Bram prepared so many TVC practice puzzles :)

I assume this answers your question. :)

http://puzzleparasite.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/tvc-xvii-practise-par...

Announcements Password protected puzzle has 11 pages (including a cover page with points table) Time bonus will be computed after you click 'Claim Bonus' Penalty will be given irrespective of correctness of submission Contest Length : 75 minutes Total Points : 1000 Bonus : 3 points per minute saved (Computed upto seconds) Grace Period : 5 minutes Penalty : 5 points per minute used (Computed upto seconds)

Link to score page : http://logicmastersindia.com/TVC/XVII/score.asp

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test?	Just right
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

Thanks for a fun test. I especially liked the TAPA LOGIC, and the Tapa Magic puzzles.

I am a newbie..Could you please tell me the password of the puzzle booklet?

We will not be posting the password here in the forum. You need to login at the submission page ( http://logicmastersindia.com/TVC/XVII/ ), start the test, and you will get the password.

You might want to read the F.A.Q. about this.

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test?	Just right
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

Puzzles were nice. At some points I needed to bifurcate, but that's probably due to time pressure, not finding a more logical way quickly enough. The only complaint is perhaps Alternative Tapa; the grid is too big, so scanning which letters have been covered is difficult (see: Hitori puzzles), and the existence of letters occurring only once made me to reconsider for a moment whether it's possible for a letter to not have any shaded cell at all. (It said "only one of them are passed by the wall", not "exactly one", so that thought crossed my mind. At the end I just assumed it's a linguistic mistake.)

Clarification on Alternative Tapa

If any letter is appearing exactly once in the grid, the corresponding cell must be part of the wall.

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test?	Just right
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Many puzzles were worth too much or too little
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

Outside Tapa was much cheaper in my opinion - well nice points to me with small time. Tapa without borders were too cheap in my opinion - hard points from there for me. I really enjoyed the first one. really nice puzzle and with very good outer look. It was hard (also was expensive if I look it now) but was a good introduction to the contest.

I was thinking about Florian during solving the puzzles (especially the first one) and reminded some good times we had together. Not much time of that but still something. We had some conversations more in BIST2012 as there were not so many from outside of China and we hanged out quite a lot together. I feel great that I have had many chances to meet him and am very sad about what happened. He was a great person with an extremely good humour sense.

Also thanks to the creators of the puzzles. I really enjoyed it.

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test?	Way too many puzzles (too little time)
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

Nice puzzles. Imho it should be clarified, that there may not be 0-clues in Magic Tapa, since this would cause non-uniqueness in the lower left corner.

Thank you very much for these. It would help if I noticed things like the size of the area for the Tapa with Borders. The Florian theme was lovely - as TiiT says, I was thinking of him too whilst solving - in particular of the 24hr competitions.

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test?	Way too many puzzles (too little time)
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth too much or too little
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	I have a different complaint

The fact that each puzzle's key has the letters ABC makes it very easy to enter the answer into the wrong puzzle. I did this several times before correcting them (in the end they were all right). But having them be "ABC" "DEF"etc would be helpful.

Also it would be nice if the points were listed in the IB. Not in the first version, but in the final version.

Thanks!

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test?	Just right
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

Wooo. Full 0.2 points of bonus. Got stuck on the last Tapa Magic because I can't count to 2 (kept colouring 3 around a cell). When I saw my mistake I somehow managed to solve it and enter it just within the time limit in the last minute.

Fun set. Will have to get back to the second Skyscraper to figure out a bit more of the logic.

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
How did you feel about the length / time limit for this test?	Just right
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	I have a different complaint

The last puzzle allows a double solution (although with the same answer)

It's good to avoid unnecessary graphics in booklets, which slow down printing

You should check again, I'm confident that it has only one solution. Maybe your alternate solution has some rows with repeated digits.

Zero is not Classic Tapa clue. Tapa clues are from 1 to 8. If the zero is used in a varition we mention in the instruction. Moreover if the zero had been used in this variation, you would use the zero in clue cells with slash like 0/3, 0/1, 0/4. So it means there are tons of solutions. So you cannot use the zero in regular Tapa unless the instruction says 0-8 digits .