Deb, thank you very much for wonderful test! I had very enjoyable 2 hours in the weekend. And of course i like the point system, i think it is very useful. I tried to solve hard puzzles in begining, some of them was solved smoothly, some of them not solved, and they caused some trouble for me. During the test i forgot some rule additions of some puzzles like hitori, like minesweeper, and i spent more time for these puzzles, i was a little upset for this. Because i can get easily more than 400 points. But anyway i like your puzzle style, contest format, nice instruction booklet, very useful points system. So thank you very much, and in my language "Tesekkur ederim" :)

Best,

Serkan

Deb, let me add my thanks for an excellent competition. Personally, I don't particularly care about the point system, but this one seemed more fun than most. For the 99% of people who are not going to finish in 90 minutes, it gave us something to think about. Thanks for the tip about the adjacent circles in Breakpoints, although knowing that meant the puzzle took me 2 minutes max, rather than the 30 minutes that I wasted not solving it in the competition :)

Thanks again.

Steve, I figured that your strategy of "solving all easy puzzles first before cracking the difficult ones" is best. I didn't follow everyone's progress so others might have followed similar strategy.
Congratulations on topping the UK chart this time.

The Missing Breakpoint properties mentioned above are really interesting. As a self-taught puzzler I tend to just hit everything with a hammer and hope it works. Is there somewhere online that people discuss these puzzle-solving theories?

We try to do that for some puzzles in every test. But we don't do it consistently enough.
It is always interesting to discuss how the author expected players to solve a puzzle vs how players solved it.

Twist LightUps were not difficult by any standard (although they were not solved by many)

I had solving methods documented for them, so thought of sharing

Thanks Deb for this excellent test.

My original strategy was to try to solve all the easy puzzles and then some hard ones if possible, but I changed my mind because some puzzle types were so attractive that I really wanted to try both puzzles. Finally I solved puzzles only according to my likes, but still hoping to get at least the equivalent amount of points of all the easy puzzles ; and I did so despite some silly mistakes. So, good operation.
The puzzles themselves (the ones I solved) were very nice, and several were better than that. As expected, rectangles were fun to solve, as were masyu (especially the little one). Fences were pretty easy but, again, fun. Just forgot to send the answer for biggest one... Both hitori were excellent. I solved the second one after the test and it was really great (and a bit strange) to have so much pleasure on hitori.
I couldn't solve the biggest "breakpoints" but the smallest was nice too, etc.

All in all, an affordable test but with some tough puzzles for strongest solvers... Many beautiful grids... Nice job, really.

I think this is exactly what Deb intended :-)