I am glad this round did take place as per the schedule. Thanks everyone who took part, and everyone who posted their feedback!

I tried to keep the sudokus "not difficult" in this round. And we have a record number of finishers this time! Happy to see 21 finishers from India.

Personally I would have liked to make some of the sudokus more elegant - less clues in renban 9x9, more "true or lie" clues in True or Lie 9x9 and lesser shaded clues in fortress 9x9. Coded and Consecutive Pairs were exactly as I had planned. For Coded, I came up with the "The charm of March" initially and luckily got a neat "Home craft" from these letters. This helped to make the decoding part very easy. (Pleasantly) Surprised to see many "pure" sudoku players attempt and solve coded sudoku in this contest.

Nice to see Kartik, Shambo, Harsh, Poonam, James Peter, Dhruva, Nityant and Harmeet in the 100s! Congratulations all!
And a very impressive timing from Tantan - significantly ahead of everyone else. Congratulations!

Looking forward to the next round - Math.

My opinion on the grayscale benchmark, although I never had a real problem in a competition with this :

Shaded
Ideal - K
Workable - C,D
Too dark - B,S
Impossible to see my writing : A

Thermo
Ideal - F
Workable - E,G
Too dark - H,I
Impossible to see my writing : J

Line
Ideal - M,Q
Workable - N,O
Too light/dark - L,P,R

Arrow
Ideal - U
Workable - T,V,X
Too dark - W


I think overall, I prefer lines (and arrows) darker than shading/thermo.
Also for clues (like coded), I'd rather they were small and in a corner rather than big and center (it also gives the advantage of printing them black instead of grey).

Thanks Bakpao, Veronika, TiiT, Kithyane for your inputs on the grayscale and others for their feedback.
More or less combining Ideal and Workable choices, it overlaps for all of you. We will take this into our consideration and implement these choices in the next round whenever applicable.

Thats a good point TiiT, it may be possible PDF rendering is impacting some way, hopefully not too much. We will see if there is any resolution setting that can be improved while generating pdf.

I'd say I'm in complete agreement with bakpao, would prefer as light as possible. (Saying this now because of Double Chocos on Puzzle Ramayan round that recently concluded. Shading of them felt so dark that I had trouble extracting solution codes.)