Thank you to everyone who participated. I (we?) hope you enjoyed the contest. If you haven't yet, please vote in the other forum topic - https://logicmastersindia.com/forum/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=2753 . It will help us in knowing how useful the Penpa feature was. Feel free to comment on that topic about shortcomings if any that you'd like to see improved if at all we do this again in a future contest.

Congratulations to all the winners.

This is meant for everyone, but especially those Sudoku solvers who gave a puzzle contest a go for the first time, please feel free to try the puzzles at leisure as well and post your doubts here on rules or ways to approach the puzzles.

My experience on this one was a weird one. I had some puzzles ready, and I didn't have any overall theme that I was happy with. I ended up scrapping the whole idea, discarding the puzzles and redoing the contest to have A) Minis that would be good for beginners, B) a tie-in to Sudoku, and C) the theme through the contest for the 6x6s. Overall I'm happy with how it turned out, and I thank Murat especially for his quick uniqueness-check testing and feedback so that I could get this ready in very short time.

The other testers as credited on the Instruction booklet, had their strengths and weaknesses with regards to Sudoku vs other puzzle types, and that made it a bit more difficult than usual to assign points. I generally erred on the side of thinking "Its ok if Sudokus are overvalued a little because this is a puzzle contest that neeedn't account for 'Sudoku specialists'". I hope that worked and gave solvers an accurate experience.