Home
 
 
motris
06 July 2007 @ 03:25 am
While I've been busy finishing my last month of work here in Cambridge, I happened upon an interesting puzzle site this evening. PuzzlePicnic is a nascent puzzle community from a bunch of Dutch puzzlers/constructors including some WPC competitors. It offers a variety of logic puzzles from the expected Sudoku and Kakuro and Fences to other familiar WPC types like Spiral Galaxies and Tents and Easy as ABC and Battleships and then some others that are much less common. The interface for solving these puzzles makes use of six colors of pencils, perhaps suggesting that you'll want to be keeping track of a couple different sets of guesses, but the puzzles I have tried so far have been fairly reasonable to do with only one color thankfully.

As with all pencil puzzles, the transition to the online form is not always smooth. The number puzzles are not as well formatted right now as on say, Nikoli.com, as it seems clicking multiple times is needed to cycle through the numbers, but the loop fitting and piece fitting puzzles work alright in this online format. A couple of the types are probably still best solved on paper though, as notekeeping is not always easy. Especially on puzzles like battleships, the option to mark unused squares as seas would be helpful. [Edit: the problem may be with Macintosh browsers and java windows - my right mouse button is meant to do these things but doesn't.]

I expect that you will enjoy the range of puzzles and especially the wide number of variants that can occur within (like Fences with bigger numbers which are a nice change of pace, Battleships grids with the expected different sizes/fleets, but also several non-square grids!).

One very intriguing part of their design is the "puzzle studio" area where members can write and submit their own puzzles in these various types. This is an ambitious goal, but one I hope prospers for their community. Please check out this site.
Tags: