Deltoidal Trihexagonal Tree: Perhaps shade the nodes with letters to distinguish them, because I misread a "B" as a "8" while trying the examples.

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I feel like there will probably be a lot of people who solve every puzzle.

I was so close, but I lost too much time on the 2nd killer tetrakis, and also a lot of time identifying a stupid mistake on the 2nd proximity snake, and couldn't finish the second deltoid tree.

Really really awesome set! I loved the puzzles! I'd love to see more convention-breaking ideas like these nonstandard tessellating grids.

could not manage to even open the kaleidoscope pl help

Thanks a lot for the test, it was very well done. I should have finished, but kept making a stupid mistake on the large Yagit, finally the fourth print-out went through. Also took too long to resolve that right 7 in the hard proximity snake. Trapezoids and the large tree were the only puzzles that felt fast, but I wouldn't be surprised if most solvers stumble somewhere.

My favourite in terms of aesthetics is the Yagit, it's just fun to draw those arcs. (Have you considered presenting this as intersecting circles? I find that prettier, and it would make the rules easier to explain.) In terms of logic, I like the Trapezoids. The Killer also has a lot to offer, it's just that latin squares will never be my favourites.

I made a version with the nodes shaded, but it was too late to replace the PB, sorry.



Thanks Jacob! I have one more collection of puzzles from this summer that I'm going to release as an eBook as soon as I finish testing it. It features an idea borrowed from David Millar applied to one of the puzzle types from this competition.



Sorry to hear that you couldn't open the book. I didn't see the message until your time was up. Were you able to open the IB before the test?



Thanks Rob! I might try to present the Yagit's as intersecting circles in the future. It was one of the first combinations I came up with, but remains the hardest to explain. I knew my set would need to include some kind of killer variant, and Aziz Ate?' excellent Triangular Skyscrapers concept in the USPC practice seemed a natural choice. I'm still a bit exhausted with Sudoku, so I can understand your point about latin squares...there are plenty of other ways to constrain a number placement puzzle.

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?	Too many medium difficult puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Deltoidal Trihexagonal Tree - 2
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Truncated Square Chocona - 2
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Trapezoids - 2

I'm catching my breath after I solved Deltoidal Trihexagonal Tree 2 with 50 seconds to spare. Figuring out the answer key takes 40 seconds on its own. Doesn't help that I'm also listening to a song that gets paced up near the end.

When I saw the test, I was like, "12 puzzles in 120 minutes? Really?" Turns out that it's not enough. Perhaps it's because the puzzle types are all very new (although Trapezoid seems simple enough that it might have possibly been made before). Perhaps because the puzzles were pretty tough themselves. (I didn't touch the Killer Tetrakis Square puzzles, but since I got stuck when trying to solve the second example, I suppose that was for the better.)

The choice of puzzles was pretty good. Truncated Square Chocona is pretty weird, mostly with the octagon restriction, but that gives interesting puzzles. Trapezoids, as mentioned above, should be simple enough that someone should have made tried it before. I initially wondered why Proximity Snake doesn't use the same grid as Rhombitrihexagonal Yagit, but I suppose that's to give more cells to work with.

The answer keys. Of course. The fact that almost all of them uses the same format (number of cells separated by color change / border) is good, even if some of them becomes awkward. But Deltoidal Hexagonal Tree is awful. One reason is my previous post, where I misread a B as an eight when trying an example. Another reason is because counting the lengths is hard when the branches get twisty. Of course, there's also a reason of why you can't just use the same format as the other puzzles, but that's a minor reason. The issue is mostly about the counting.

For the presentation, there are just minor issues. Borders in Truncated Square Chocona might have been better thicker. Points can be listed next to the puzzle number instead of spread out to the right; I was initially confused of why the small Rhombitrihexagonal Yagit is worth 34 points and not 20. Puzzles might be better to have the same orientation everywhere, instead of having rows in the small hex-based puzzles but columns in the large ones (the grid is tilted 30 degrees). But yeah, mostly minor.

Overall, it's a nice test, if a little on the tough side. And hey, at least it's another test on LMI.

The grids are at different orientations because I originally designed all of the large puzzles vertically. Perhaps I should have kept them that way, but I wanted to keep them the same orientation as on my blog.

Truncated Square Chocona was the first combination of this series that I got to work, so its pretty special to me. I'm glad to see it was one of your favorites as well.

I wouldn't be surprised if Trapezoids already exists on a blog or in a Nikoli book somewhere. I got the idea from Cell-Land (Serurando) by Inaba Naoki.

For Tree, even though the deltoidal trihexagonal tiling has so many straight lines, this was the best way I could find to get an answer string that wouldn't be easy to guess, even though it's time-consuming to count.

The good/bad thing about Proximity Snake is that it, like Slitherlink, could work on any tiling with the same rules.

I didn't mean to critize the Killer type at all! I found the logic in the Killers very interesting (those on your blog in particular, during the contest I didn't really have the time). I just personally tend towards puzzles where I can draw the solution, and tried to put that forward as a justification for preferring the other types.

Looking forward to the extra set.

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?	Fairly Nice
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Truncated Square Chocona - 2
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Killer Tetrakis Square - 1
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Proximity Snake - 1

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
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

From the perspective of a more ordinary/average puzzle enthusiast, I felt these were FAR too difficult, to the point that I am reconsidering my hobbies. The problem is that even understanding the rules, I have no idea how to solve them. For example, the fence puzzles and killer puzzles, I could not break into even the small ones. The other small puzzles were mostly trial and error for me, and the larger ones were hopelessly out of reach. I rarely felt like I was ever making progress, even on the three I managed to finish. After about 90 minutes, I just gave up and let the clock run out. It was very ambitious creating so many new puzzles and I hope to see more of them, perhaps in a more casual format. The layout was excellent and the complex rules were understandable.

There are already some walkthroughs for the second examples of Rhombitrihexagonal Yagit (I assume that's what you mean by the fence puzzle) and of Killer Tetrakis Square. For Yagit, most of the trick is to draw walls between different symbols, extend walls to reach black points or the edge, and mark edges that can't be walls. For the Killer... well, I didn't try them either (I didn't progress much for the first puzzle), but most of the tricks are based on Killer Sudoku, with occasional deductions from "no identically oriented triangles have the same number" rule.

Thanks, and don't give up! This selection is somewhat more difficult than the introductions on my blog, which you might find to be a more casual environment.

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
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Deltoidal Trihexagonal Tree - 2
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Truncated Square Chocona - 2

Time bonus currently seems to be calculated at 8 points per minute.

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
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Too few pages / too small grids
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Truncated Square Chocona - 2
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Truncated Square Chocona - 1
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Rhombitrihexagonal Yagit - 1

Thanks for the great contest! I liked the variety, especially the nice strategy in Chocona. For me, though, I thought there was too much of a gap between the smaller (easier) and larger (harder) puzzles. I guessed-and-checked a lot on the easier puzzles (Trapezoids and Snake) and barely got to any of the harder puzzles. Maybe that's just me :P

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
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Too few pages / too small grids
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Deltoidal Trihexagonal Tree - 2
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Trapezoids - 2
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Proximity Snake - 2

This was a nicely constructed set, although it in general caused me more probems than I would have hoped. I didn't really prepare so had to make sure of the rules while solving a lot because I had to make sure of the adjusted rules. I skipped the most troublesome grids at first (Yagit and Tree). The Tree turned out to be my favourite type though. It worked really well with the genre.
I thought the Yagit would cause me the most problems and I proved myself right (unfortunately). There were a lot of rules that made it hard for me to know what to really be looking for. I made an error in the small one, but managed to fix that when I saw a bad deduction in the resolve. But it was a struggle to get through. I gave the larger puzzle a go in the last minutes but couldn't really make any progress. I think I'm still missing some logical tools to get those started. I'll get to it at a later time.

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?	Too many medium difficult puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Too few pages / too small grids

Yes, should have been 318.3.

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
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Deltoidal Trihexagonal Tree - 2
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Truncated Square Chocona - 2
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Killer Tetrakis Square - 2

What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

I'm not sure if these are too hard or just too different. I still don't even understnad the yagit variant.

Congratulations to Endo Ken, Robert Vollmert, and Tomoya Kimura for your incredible solve times. It took me . and thank you so much to everyone who participated. Thank you especially to Prasanna Seshadri, Tiit Vunk, and Deb Mohanty for all your work testing and administrating.

This is certainly not the end of puzzles on non-rectangular grids! There are a lot more ideas in the works and an entire frontier of unexplored tilings. All of these puzzles were designed in several tiny gridded sketchbooks that I made and brought with me on the long bus rides to and from my internship at an architecture firm this summer. Here are two of the four process pages for Truncated Square Chocona 2:



Anne Tyng was an architect and educator who collaborated with Louis Kahn in several projects that explored non-rectangular tilings, including the Yale University Art Gallery, a prospective City Tower for Philadelphia, and early schemes for the Erdman Hall Dormitory and the Trenton Jewish Community Center (pictured below). Tyng was one of many architects in the early 20th century who referenced D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form, chapters 7 and 8 of which illustrate cell aggregation and packing.



Paramesis is a portmanteau of parametric mimesis, a phrase I started using in 2013 to describe an intersection between parametric modeling, architecture, and biology, before I knew that a widely accepted term, for what I was thinking about already exists. The outer circle of the logo represents a genuine attempt to devise a puzzle that would have been called "meristem" and played on a randomized voronoi grid. The objective would have had something to do with auxin gradients, perhaps as some kind of Bossa Nova variant. This attempt eluded me because at corners where four or more cells meet, it can be very difficult to determine whether two cells share an edge or a vertex. Some kind of order was needed.

Thank you everyone for your feedback.

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
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Rhombitrihexagonal Yagit - 1
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Rhombitrihexagonal Yagit - 2
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Trapezoids - 1