Like every year, he finished all the 12 puzzles in a stretch. Congratulations to Gotroch.

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hex Slitherlink
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hidoku
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Pentopia
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Fair

I successfuly finished Marathon! (And I did it in quite Marathon way - solving all puzzles in one 8 hour session)
Thanks for very nice puzzles!

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Spiral Galaxy
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Akari
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hidoku
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Linked Poset Futoshiki
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Word Search Sudoku
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Twin Co-Ordinates
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Pentopia
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	LITS+
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Domino Loop
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Fairly Nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Fair

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Spiral Galaxy
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	LITS+
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Pentopia
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Fair

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	LITS+
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Neighbours
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hidoku
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Fair

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Pentopia
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Domino Loop
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hex Slitherlink
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Fair

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Spiral Galaxy
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Linked Poset Futoshiki
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Pentopia
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair

The puzzles actually were all reasonable in terms of difficulty. They were comparable with each other. Last year you never knew how long it takes and it was hard to plan solving them. This year it was nicely done.
I was also afraid a bit of the Twin Coordinates puzzle but it actually took about the same time as others - so perfect. Some got a jackpot with this but if you consider that you can throw 2 away, it's not a big problem if you fail this.
Anyway, cheers to the organizers for such a great competition. It'll be interesting to watch where I end up.

TiiT

I think my copy of that puzzle was broken, it had just three twins. :)

Before the contest, I thought the scoring change which allowed authors to also skip two was unnecessary, but now I'm quite thankful for it!

How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair

Great puzzles! Thank you.

Now that I know the real rules of Poset Futoshiki, I am not very happy with the example. I thought that "X < Y" means I can only place numbers X and Y which are connected by an arrow. The fact that I can jump over numbers was not very clear.

But that's just a minor remark.

All in all it was a nice contest, I can't even choose my favorites, because each one of the puzzles was really cool.

Edited by Semax 2016-04-04 3:04 AM

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Linked Poset Futoshiki
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Pentopia
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Domino Loop
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Linked Poset Futoshiki
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Word Search Sudoku
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hex Slitherlink
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair

Thanks to all authors for knitting together a beautiful contest . I greatly enjoyed the aesthetics and the solve path in all the puzzles with the exception of 1 or 2 puzzles which I hated. I also like this concept of slightly lesser difficult marathon puzzles enabling bonus. I hope this formula continues from next year .Thanks to Prasanna for helping me out with the example puzzles of Hex slitherlink and domino loop snake. These were new types to me and without solving the examples,I couldn't have solved the contest ones.

The marathon is becoming better and sweeter each year and this year was no exception !!

Is there a way to play this without it impacting my rating? I will only have time for a few of the puzzles...

There is no way to select this option from the submission page, but we will exclude your score from ratings calculations as per this request.

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hidoku
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Spiral Galaxy
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Akari
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Fair

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hidoku
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Spiral Galaxy
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Pentopia
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair

A wonderful set of puzzles (not counting mine; it's unfair to judge my own puzzle). Mostly. Except for Twin Co-Ordinates, because I loathe visual puzzles. But that's about the genre; the puzzle itself is fine.

Each puzzle has its own pros and cons. Those that are the most interesting for me are shown in the table above:
- Hidoku: Still a wonder on how to make these so well. I still remember four years ago when Palmer said he wouldn't make more Hidato/Hidoku puzzles, though: https://mellowmelon.wordpress.com/2012/05/27/puzzle-pack-3/ :P
- Spiral Galaxy: Totally not because my time is under 15 minutes. But as usual, nicely constructed Galaxies puzzles are always a wonder to solve, on how really unusual/large regions can span across the grid.
- Pentopia: I'm not sure why, but I just find this one nice to solve. This is a close call, actually; fighting for this spot as well are Hex Slitherlink with its nice pattern (although impure, like this Pentopia), LITS+ with interesting logic around, and Domino Loop that's also pleasant to solve.

Yes, this part is unfortunate. I was hoping that people would have tried the Poset Futoshiki fun contest that was just a month ago (mostly for its better example), but I think I forgot to tell people to do that. On retrospect, I should have used a larger example (2x4x4).

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Linked Poset Futoshiki
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Pentopia
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hex Slitherlink
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair

LPF just flowed so nicely. No big pauses. Just fill it in. Didn't really like Akari. I'm not a fan of Akari to begin with, but then I thought too much trial and error due to not much overlap between number clues.

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hex Slitherlink
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Pentopia
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hidoku
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Fair

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hidoku
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Domino Loop
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Pentopia
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hidoku
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	LITS+
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Pentopia
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair

Nice set of puuzles! I really like puzzle marathon :-)

Hi, I'm new to this and I'm a little confused by Linked Poset Futoshiki. I see that there are 4 rules to this puzzle:
1. Assign one of the 3 diagrams to a small grid
2. Solve each small grid so each number appears once every row/column
3. Make sure all >/< signs are complied
4. Digits separated by gaps must be identical.

I get 2,3 and 4. But I don't understand no.1. How does the diagram relate to the grids? What do the diagrams mean?
Sorry for the very newbie question, and sorry if this is in the wrong place. Found this puzzle via Reddit.

Lets look at the example below. By "diagram", we mean one of the trees (colored for your reference).
So, each small grid (3X3 in the example and 6X6 in the actual puzzle) will be assigned one diagram.
i.e. the "Inequality" rule in each grid will be governed by the "tree diagram" associated.

If you look at the solutions on the right, the top left and bottom right grids are assigned with tree diagram marked as "Maximum". Similarly, the top right and bottom left grids are assigned the tree diagram marked as "Minimum"

If something is still not clear, let us know.

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	LITS+
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Linked Poset Futoshiki
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Pentopia
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Fair