Yesterday someone pointed me to the French WPC Qualifier as additional practice. I took a quick peek and was pleasantly surprised to find that there were more Hashiwokakuro and Total Masyu on there in the list of puzzles. Then I looked at the puzzles and saw that my blog examples had been reused in entirety (without credit given) and authorship given in the solutions instead to Jean-Louis Legrand. He stole my mystery KenKen too. A little research suggests he has copied my styles before (he did a Mastermindoku in 2008) which is fine with me. Copying styles is gray area, and should give some credit to the originator, but I welcome any new puzzles in ideas I've shared here. Copying my exact puzzles is not! I'm seriously upset by it, disappointed in the French organizers as it compromises their championship to have 5 puzzles that were already out there in the public, and while I've sent email along the proper channels to get the details behind this matter (and will get the authorship issue fixed), I felt the need to vent my frustration here as well.

Anyway, for today's Friday puzzle, when everyone will want to be discussing the rules for Saturday's test soon, I thought I'd do a variation on two types that seem to be on the USPC every year in recent memory: Yajilin-Battleship.

In these two puzzles (the first very easy, the second less so), place the fleet of ships into the grid so that no ships touch, even diagonally (note this is different than the yajilin black square rule where diagonal touching is allowed), and so that each numbered arrow gives the number of ship segments in the indicated direction. The remaining empty white squares must form a single closed loop. Note: In the second puzzle two ships and two seas are given to you in the grid; the "seas" are necessarily in the loop.