Thanks for the contest! So good to have TVC back. Some great puzzles in there (once I could solve them at a relaxed pace), I particularly enjoyed the Balance Tapa.

As for the contest as such, I struggled a lot, would never have expected to come out reasonably high up in the standings (I even lost the last 15 minutes to failing to finish the high-pointer Hamle). I didn't have a single solve that wasn't mostly driven by intuition/guessing/uniqueness.

I think it's fine to have contests with puzzles that are this difficult (and there's folks who can enjoy that more than I can), but I believe that you'll get more solvers appreciating solving paths, and fewer frustrated solvers in general, if you tone down the difficulty slightly (or even a lot...). I imagine this contest would have been quite disheartening for inexperienced solvers.

I agree with Rob. I am a fan of the TVC and always found it very interesting and innovative, but this round was way beyond the limit, so I give it up with mixed feelings. After the contest, I realized that at least the last three puzzles have a great logical path, and I appreciated this moderate difficulty with no need to guess and bifurcate. Anyway, thanks for the contest!

I also agree -- this round was brutally tough. I still found it enjoyable, but I was sad to not be able to even look at most of the puzzles.

Some puzzles were definitely amazing, I enjoyed solving Palindrome, Black hole during the contest. Some low pointers were also very tough/trick, felt bashy.
Definitely difficulty was way higher than what I had in mind and yet to solve remaining puzzles. Puzzle quality is definitely good, but would appreciate if there are some approachable puzzles in the mix.
Thanks to Authors, Testers and LMI for the effort, it was fun contest.

I did not enjoy this contest. First problem: some difficult puzzles are fine. An entire set of nothing but extremely difficult puzzles is not in this context, as less experienced solvers end up with nothing they can really do, and more experienced solvers have to resort to guessing, bashing, and generally hoping to pick the puzzles that are more approachable. Which leads to my second problem: the point values were all over the place. The first two puzzles were very similar in point value, though I found the second one to be significantly harder and in fact couldn't break in during the contest. Even outside the clock, it took me a couple minutes to figure out what was necessary. The first Hamle I solved logically and smoothly in about the same amount of time as the first Tapa Line, despite being worth 2.5 times as much. The rest of the test is the same way- outside of grid size, there didn't seem to be any correlation between difficulty/time to solve and points, which made puzzle selection even more of a crapshoot.

I also ended up breaking a couple puzzles late that I couldn't fix (122 point Hamle, Palindromes- the puzzle having multiple plausible readings of the palindrome lines definitely didn't help) which would have helped my score, but not my opinion of the test. Puzzles I liked: Balance Tapa was fun, and the Hamles were interesting though the variant is very difficult to notate. The first Regional was very nice too but like almost everything else crazy undervalued.
Puzzles I didn't like: Both Pata (way too bashy, haven't solved the second yet despite a lot of time- the variant is a good one), both Easy as Tapa (way way way too bashy, haven't made any progress in either, IMO the variant is a lost cause), Palindrome (crossing and overlapping lines were unclear and unexplained in the instructions, this was avoidable with a better example).

This was the first round of TVC I was around for. If future rounds will be like this one, it'll be the last I participate in. My experience was that negative- a first for contest rounds for me. Even my first puzzle grand prix round that I bombed was enjoyable during- this wasn't.

https://youtu.be/VhLbr2HONGs

We have covered a video on Pata puzzle high pointer. Logical solve path. Do check the video.

The Solutions Booklet is now available.

Thanks to the 207 participants!

Congratulations to the winners (500+ scores): Prasanna Seshadri, Walker Anderson, Endo Ken, James McGowan and Hideaki Jo.

Agree that the test overall was too difficult.
A different opinion from the others is that I don't think it is a bad thing to have a test that is unfinishable.
It is fair for strategizing to be part of the contest. I feel it is a good change from the Sudoku sprints we've been having.

I think the downfall of this TVC was the lack of easy and straightforward puzzles in the test.
Nice puzzles for sure, (I enjoyed them after) but maybe not suitable for a 75 minute test.