This is part 2 of 2 posts about my experience at the 2023 24 Hour Puzzle Championship which happened on 28-30th April 2023 in Budapest, Hungary. The first part was a personal account of events leading up to, during and after the competition. This part will be a breakdown of my thoughts on each round. Note that this report was written last year, so the many instances of “this year” means 2023. You can click on each image for the enlarged version.
We were having too much fun trying to figure out why people were getting different schedules (left = Zoltan Krystian Swiderski, right = no Zoltan). Also, there were two dinners and two breakfasts.
Round 1 – Puzzles by Kartal Nagy and Zoltan Nemeth
Hungary is planning a bid to host the 2025 WSPC – 14 years since their last outing in 2011. That was the first time the WSC and WPC were combined and Hungary, with their steady supply of authors, were one of few hosts that could pull off such a feat at that time. Veteran Zoltan Nemeth teamed up with a more recent name, Kartal Nagy, to serve us this year’s opener.
This round, along with several others, had a bimodal distribution of points, which forced solvers to decide between a conservative or an aggressive approach. After banking a lot of easy pointers, it was time to get greedy. After sinking 15 minutes into the Criss-Cross (75 points) which used just 0s and 1s, I ran into a contradiction. Since I attacked this logically, it was hard to find what went wrong. I then skipped to Triple Jump (80 points); the puzzle just wouldn’t budge even after having a rough idea of possible piece placements. Then I hopped to Stostone (75 points), and again, broke it despite using a logical approach. This is textbook collapse. 40 minutes gone with nothing to show for. I try to quickly recuperate by mowing down easier puzzles until time ran out. Not good out of the gate.
Score: 410/830 by Ken Endo – 21st place.
The first number is my score and the second number is the top score of the round.
Favourite puzzle: Castle Wall 2
Kartal Nagy (centre) at the Q&A.
Round 2 – Puzzles by Fatih Kamer Anda an Serkan Yurekli
Given the disaster of the previous round, I was more cautious here. The Thermo Sudoku took me far too long which further compounded my need to play it safe. After sprinting through a lot of easy but nice puzzles for an hour, I decided to tackle the Pentominous (120 points). A huge risk since you usually never know if you’ve solved Pentominous right or not. A brief moment of dread swept me when I couldn’t quite piece in the top right corner. Thankfully, I fixed it in time. A nice set by trusted authors spanning a good variety of vanilla genres.
Score: 530/905 by Ken Endo – 12th place.
Favourite puzzle: Numberlink
Serkan Yurekli, the Puzzle Robot.
Round 3 – Puzzles by Peter and Zoltan Gyimesi
Inspired by 2022 WPC’s Antiknight round, father-son chess-playing duo, wrote this round featuring 13 Antiknight variants. First half went well for me before several bad decisions saw me attempting puzzles that I am not efficient at. I knew some tricks for Knight Battleships but sneakily, both these puzzles didn’t use the standard fleet. I toiled for almost 20 minutes in both Makaro just to have them both marked wrong. A fun set though, the theme reminds me of what Matus Demiger usually do in his 24HPC sets.
Score: 255/750 by Ken Endo – 23rd place.
Favourite puzzle: Antiknight Pentominous
My solve just completely went off the rails.
Round 4 – Puzzles by Nikola Zivanovic
Rounding out the daytime session was Nikola’s round where I traditionally do well in. Ken and Kota were sitting this one out, so it was a good chance to make up some ground. There were a lot of object placement which suited me very well. I panicked a little when the Hungarian Pentomino (65 points) didn’t work until I realise, I had neglected the upper right corner. My logophilia certainly helped me plough through Scrabble and Word Snail with comfortable ease. My only downfall was spending too long in the second Hungarian Tapa where guessing would’ve chugged things along quickly. I finished 5th, my best performance throughout this year’s event.
Score: 640/720 by Prasanna Seshadri – 5th place.
Favourite puzzle: Password Battleships. I haven’t seen this type before, can’t wait to try and make some. [Later in the year, I would make two such puzzles for the Indian Puzzle Championship.]
Nikola Zivanovic, another name you know and trust
Dinner.
Round 5 – Puzzles by Ashish Kumar, Prasanna Seshadri and Rajesh Kumar
The traditional Team India fixture. I heard Walker Anderson solved all but the last 3 puzzles in 30 or so minutes, which prompted Prasanna to beef up the round by tacking on another 3 hard puzzles at the end. Intimidated by the large region, I noped out of the Heyawacky (70 points) and breezed through the set. Stopping at the last 3 puzzles, I successful wrestled the Kakuro (110 points) and was moving onto the Gapped Kakuro. As practice, I solved a large Prasanna 5-star Gapped Kakuro from GMP and it took me 30 minutes. I reasoned that if the size is not as large, it might be a worthwhile investment. Seeing how small it was, I dove right in. Then it was a moment of silence as I couldn’t find anything. That pushed me to Mastermind Tapa which I really don’t want to solve. The partial points in puzzles like this is dangling bait. Mastermind clues usually iron out the remaining couple of cells across all grids at the end, so you either solve all 4 grids or you don’t. This was the case here too and I sunk close to 30 minutes and not finishing.
Score: 520/1000 by Ken Endo – 7th place.
Favourite puzzle: Aqre Symmetry
Prasanna Seshadri and whoever is on his left please identify yourself.
Yea. This Tapa Mastermind wasn’t going to happen.
Round 6 – Puzzles by Cedomir Milanovic
Given my positive experience with Nikola’s style, I was glad to see Two Serbian sets this year. I pegged this as a round I would excel in. Wake up call. This round ended up being my worst performance (cries in Serbian). I invested a lot of time in Killer Skyscrapers where I couldn’t see a logical path.
The Clone Sudoku was also giving me a hard time. Then I was lulled into a false sense of security by quickly finding the first deductions in Letter Weights. A similar step was used in this year’s Turkey GP. But then progress stalled and I was too stubborn to let it go. Then I rushed to the three Pentominoes puzzles (Coral, Tapa and Twilight Tapa), leaving just 7 minutes left for the forgotten Scrabble (80 points). Oh my god. 7 minutes, no way. Still, I talked myself into it. “If there’s anyone who can solve that Scrabble in 7 minutes it’s you”. I was 3 words away from finishing.
Score: 180/720 by Ken Endo – 30th place. Ouch.
Favourite puzzle: *Expecto Patronum*. Scrabble? After all this time? Always.
Avoidable mistake.
Round 7 – Puzzles by Vladimir Portugalov and Andrey Bogdanov
The A + B = AB formula reminded me of Puzzle Fusion. It even had the Word Search Sudoku and Kropkuro sets! It’s been years since I quit Puzzle Duel, but I did carry a lot of Forsmarts experience to know at what time I should stop scanning and start guessing. I could’ve been more aggressive as I burnt too much clock time on puzzles that never got going. A sad middling performance on an otherwise good set of puzzles.
Score: 460/850 by Ken Endo – 16th place.
Favourite puzzle: If I’m honest with myself, Word Search. But I don’t want the authors to think that the trivial puzzle outshone 23 other nice puzzles, so I’ll say Coral Anglers.
Typical hectic 10-minute break between rounds where I’ll either rush to the toilet or cry.
Round 8 – Puzzles by Krystian Swiderski
Round 8 was my round and having it this late is disadvantageous for me since I will be compared to solvers who took the skip round earlier and in a much fresher state. Like many authors, I wrote a lot of my set back in 2020 and replaced the bulk of it which had a now-out-of-date “2020” themes. I am very happy with the difficulty calibration because people were scoring heavily despite solving it at midnight. Big thanks to Joseph Howard, Murat Can Tonta and Viktor Samu for their diligent testing.
Ken Endo topped my round with 965 points. The missing 35 points were from not finding 7 differences in Spot the Difference. I heard that this caused some laughs among the organizers in the marking room. They all empathized with Ken who, flew half the world, voluntarily deprive himself of sleep, was beginning to pick up steam scoring massively, only to be halted by a picture puzzle at one o’clock in the morning. By the way, the lady in the picture is holding the third issue of Pulze which is now a year overdue. I paid homage to my new job in the Scrabble. The choice of word list worried young French phenom Valentin Miakinen and he asked me if I was okay. How you’d guys find my round?
Back to Krystian, this round had 11 pairs of puzzles: [A] and a double variant of [A]. And one Four Winds tacked on at the end. What happened to Double Four Winds? I windsurfed on a lot of lucky breaks. Didn’t expect to be stumped by the Double Sudoku though. I ran into an invalid assumption in the Double-Back Country Road and couldn’t talk myself out of it. I missed that the loop had to enter the 4-region twice from the large 2-region in the middle. Despite the late start handicap, my hopping around was surprisingly good enough for top-10.
Side question: What is your opinion on including the statement “some cells may be left empty” in a Four Winds that uses all cells?
I think it’s a pain. If you’re writing a classic Four Winds, there’s nothing to gain from being extra tricky and forcing solvers to add up all the clues. Just say “all cells are used”. Or even better, don’t say anything.
Score: 650/1000 by Ken Endo and Kota Morinishi – 10th place.
Favourite puzzle: Akari All 2’s
Kevin broke my Castle Wall Stealth. Let’s point and laugh at his mistake.
Round 9 – Puzzles by Hatice Esra Yaka
When I wrote for the ISPC back in 2020, we were warned to steer clear from themes such as Covid-19, Coronavirus, Pandemic etc. It’s easy to offend someone who may have lost loved ones during the pandemic. So, imagine what reaction is elicited by this set’s Corona in the Woods – an intricate variant of Tiger in the Woods involving detailed descriptions of clues like “masks”, “fever” and “coughing”.
Only 10 types appeared here, the least of all the other sets. Hatice wrote a solid Evergreens round in 2019, and she now returns with half the set coded. The Skyscrapers were fun and so was the Nurikabe. Unfortunately, I was at my lowest physical condition here. I started feeling nauseous, perhaps from the stench of an unfamiliar bread spread from dinner that I brought to the table. I felt better after throwing it away. My only quibble is with the presentation of Isodoku.
It’s squished.
It ran on a full page.
There were room.
Why.
Score: 530/1000 by Ken Endo and Kota Morinishi – 18th place.
Favourite puzzle: Irregular Battleships
I’ll have whatever diet this Isodoku is having.
Roger Kohler (right) raiding breakfast at 4am.
Round 10 – Puzzles by Puzzlers Club
Puzzlers Club provided two sets which were clearly made in 2020. The first part, dubbed “Hindsight is 20/20” was broken into “Vision Genres” (not sure what linked these except for nice aesthetics and several 24s) and “Past Genres” (types from 17th-19th 24HPC). In their debut, the creative folks from PC apologised profusely about the arresting difficulty of their rounds. They calibrated that perfectly this year. There was audible laughter when everyone saw the first page: Old Maid, a find-the-odd-one-out puzzle which depicted a Snellen chart. I was tempted to start tracking from the bottom row where I correctly suspected that was where the Old Maid was, but I didn’t want to rob myself of the scanning fun and purposely found all the matches before moving on.
First part went okay for me until I hit a wall in Round Trip. I couldn’t snake my way out of a contradiction, even keeping in mind that the author used a different counting method from the normal Round Trip cluing convention. I also got lucky with Foursight by not shading in the central 2×2 square since it looked like a trap that I would set in a genre like this. Star Pentominous killed the second half for me as I was seconds away from finishing, see for yourself.
Score: 390/1000 by Ken Endo and Kota Morinishi – 17th place. Curiously, 6 people scored 390 here. Illuminati?
Favourite puzzle: Old Maid. Always good to see a visual puzzle.
Two more seconds would’ve done it.
Round 11 – Puzzles by Puzzler’s Club
“Hindsight is 20/20” part 2 is split into “Puzzle is 20/20” (20s in theme) and “Genre is 20/20” (double-named genres and genres containing the word “double”). The successful calibration of difficulty level continued here and we got ample chance to solve many nice puzzles. Nurikabe had a fun gimmick similar to the one in 2022 WPC. The themes in LITS, Ayeheya, Knapp-Daneben Fillomino were very impressive. I was fearful when I saw Anglers being 70 points, but the actual puzzle was lit. I’ve never seen such a global deduction in play. Then again, there aren’t many Anglers out there.
Heading into the second half, I kept running into roadblocks in the Double Choco (omg the theme though). I rushed out a couple more solves before time ran out. Very fun. Certainly kept me awake and motivated.
Score: 550/1000 by Ken Endo, Kota Morinishi, Christian Konig, Prasanna Seshadri and Michael Mosshammer – 17th place.
Favourite puzzle: Anglers.
Kevin Sun would’ve won newcomer any other year. Too bad he picked one where Kota turned up.
Round 12 – Puzzles by Bram de Laat
I’m surprised I’m alive to see the day where Bram had mellowed out on puzzle difficulty. I knew something was off when I cut through the 90-point Pentominous like knife in hot butter. After an hour had passed, I only had 5 puzzles left and started believing that I was doing well. At that point, I looked up to see Ken and Kota staring blankly at the ceiling having already finished. Darn, the set was easy after all. Not thinking I would be close to completing this set, I had not prepared for, and planned to skip the rarer genres like Guide Arrow, Gemini Loop, Putteria and One or All. I didn’t even read some of the rules. Deservedly I had to learn on the fly. Do not repeat this mistake.
For reading this far, I’d like to share a hack for Pentomino Regions (Pentomino Areas in other sources). The U shape is key. You cannot make the placement unique, so authors must somehow disambiguate the hole in the U. Usually with a blank cell or a snug narrow part of a region. Knowing this, there was only one place for the U and 80 points is yours. Thank me later.
Score: 900/1000 by Ken Endo, Kota Morinishi, Christian Konig, Nikola Zivanovic and Kevin Sun – 9th place.
Favourite puzzle: Why was the Sudoku grid dotted?
Christian Konig (right) would’ve won newcomer any other year. Too bad he picked one where Kota turned up.
Chiel Beenhakker (left) would’ve won newcomer if he drugged the water supply.
Round 13 – Puzzles by Sinisa Hrga
By now Sinisa’s narrow repertoire has become some sort of a tradition. I guess one advantage is that you can always recycle the IB. I have mixed feelings about Sinisa’s predictable offering. On one hand, it previously got me my best 24HPC round result ever (3rd place in 2019), on the other hand, some of these types are as fun as solitary confinement.
Dominos are always labour. The decision to present ABC Game (three Easy As puzzles; First Seen, Second Seen and a mix of the two) as a matchmaking puzzle was weird. They were all fully clued, so it was extremely clear which ones were which.
The traditional soccer players-themed word puzzle had been replaced with names of 24HPC winners. The presentation was bad. If you’re going to use a confusing presentation, then you must back that with a proper example. Here, you learn nothing from the IB. It wasn’t clear if the names were two separate words (they were), how significant the diacritical marks are (they were, and one E had a wrong accent), and crucially, that not all names are used (I panicked when I couldn’t locate ENDO). Perhaps Poker was the only fun puzzle since you actually feel some author presence, unlike the negative constraint-heavy Honeycomb Islands or Barriers where it’s just tedious bookkeeping.
Score: 385/1000 by Ken Endo – 22nd place.
Favourite puzzle: Poker
That’s it from me. I’m curious if some of my observations were similar to yours.
See you next time.
Somewhere Over the Rainbow 