Wonderful puzzle. It looks like it's impenetrable, but about 20-30 minutes in I found the break-in and I actually started filling the grid. I imagine this is a similar experience to many people doing my fun test of a 16x16 Poset Futoshiki from 6 years ago. It's largely logical; I had to bifurcate a bit in the middle of the solve, but I heard from others (including the author himself) that it's not really necessary and I missed a simpler solve path by focusing on a different portion of the puzzle.

Thanks for the comments, and for participating in this experiment! Thanks also to Rakesh for letting me break the rules a little with the IB, and to edderiofer and TheGreatEscaper for testing. And congrats to the top finishers for being way faster than I expected!

A few additional credits: the idea for this originated last summer when brainstorming for the We are Puzzlers Club tests. phenomist suggested a matchmaker where one of the grids was the matchmaker grid itself, and while we didn't end up using it then, I couldn't get the idea of a meta-matchmaker out of my head. Back in January I got around to putting this together, and edderiofer came up with the idea of presenting it as a "normal" puzzle in the IB and springing the twist after the competition started.

Genre inspirations: most of the room rule choices were inspired by Bram de Laat's Four-Colour Loop, one of my all-time favorite chimera puzzles. Detour is by wen (also featured in last year's WAPC tests), and Variety was invented for this contest because I couldn't think of any other rooms-and-numbers loop genres. And for circle clues, I found it helpful to get ideas by staring at TheGreatEscaper's Ludicrous Loop. Finally, Palindrome Pearls was invented because the circle clue placement was ridiculously constrained, so I wanted a genre where I could add room borders to fix contradictions. Not sure it's a viable genre on its own though.

Edited by ostroffj 2020-04-30 12:41 AM

This puzzle was a masterpiece! Big thanks for the tremendous effort of preparing it. I completed it in more or less 5 hours. I started it today at ~15:20, completed at ~20:10, but got a mistake in Row C only. Took me more than 20 minutes to figure out where it is, but it was easy to fix it, so I got the correct answer 7 minutes after the contest ended xD.

That puzzle was an awesome experience, thank you Jonah !
I honestly can't begin to comprehend how such a puzzle can be created, it is very impressive.

The feelings when I opened the pdf, saw the matchmaker grid and thought "uh, where is the puzzle ?", then read the first line of the second page... big emotional whiplash :D
(I don't know if some people expected the twist beforehand, but I was not one of them !)

The entry point was not trivial (constraint between Country, and ? clue limited to 6) but I suppose I had a good intuition on that day !
After that the puzzle solved quite smoothly.
I had a bit of a difficult moment in the C zone, luckily never destroying my progress in other parts ; and had to use trial and error to join several loop parts around the junction of ABDE regions in the end (I guess I started to be tired and didn't notice something logical with the masyu rule ?).

I must say, after all that I was quite surprised to see it had only taken me 90 minutes, it felt like a longer journey !

Solution Booklet.

I got another solution, could anyone check it, please? It's only different in the middle sector, starting in row 8 (key C): 213312; row 9: 11211222; row 10: 112341 and the ice-barn-clues in row 8 and 10 are visited twice. Thx

Edited by oe2 2020-04-30 9:16 PM

The ice barn clue in row 10 could not be visited twice, as the horizontal crossing would violate the Liar restriction, as it would be a room entry of length 1.

Oh yeah, I got exactly the same mistake... Noticing that this particular ice barn crossing is forbidden by liar rule was pretty tricky to me, that was the mistake I was searching 20 minutes for and it would definitely simplify the process of solving had I noticed it earlier.

Thanks