Deckardv Puzzle Gauntlet Recap + Experience

This event on Deckardv's puzzle server is similar to a puzzle night—except it's much longer, and there's only 1 puzzle per day. A total of 260 participants signed up, and due to this, most of the zones I mentioned in my post on Puzzle Night 3 are quite different. This event's zones are as follows:

1st - 3rd: Podium
4th - 10th: Purple Zone
11th - 30th: Blue Zone
31st - 75th: Green Zone
76th - 150th: Orange Zone
151st and below: Red Zone

I participated and placed... well, you'll see at the very end of this post. My goal was to place in the "blue" zone or higher.

Puzzle 1: Star Battle \ Time: 5:24 \ Placement: 28th

The first puzzle was a moderate star battle (slightly harder than GAPP-level) with two stars per row, column, and region. Just like the last puzzle event, my puzz.link UI was in Japanese, but I still knew where most of the buttons were. After looking at this puzzle's results, I thought I would place in the blue zone most of the time, but...

Puzzle 2: Word Snakes \ Time: 6:07 \ Placement: 61st

The second puzzle was actually rather quick, and I could have gotten many of the words a lot faster. But hey, at least I solved the puzzle!

Puzzle 3: Fitting In \ Time: 1:44 \ Placement: 36th

I'm not that good at Fitting In, but this puzzle was one that I found to be pretty quick. But a lot of the other competitors thought something similar, and this puzzle turned out to be one of the fastest of the early puzzles. I did still beat my placement in the Word Snakes, though.

Puzzle 4: Nurikabe \ Time: 3:57 \ Placement: 91st

Yeah, this one was slow. But to be fair, this is one of the more common genres of the event.

Also, another thing I should mention about this event is that your bottom 10 placements are not counted on the leaderboard. Meaning you can miss up to 10 puzzles before your score starts to get affected. And when I first saw this result, I thought that this placement would likely get dropped, assuming I do all the puzzles.

Puzzle 5: Missing Middles \ Time: 0:48 \ Placement: 4th

Missing Middles is a genre where multiple words are missing a common substring. Here's an example below, from Deckardv's example image for this puzzle:

UN??CK
PA??YA
IM??IR

In this case, the missing substring is PA. But the above image is only one small fraction of the actual puzzle --- you get several of these puzzles, sometimes with the words offset so the missing substring appears earlier or later in the word.

In this Missing Middles set specifically, certain "columns" of these puzzles spelled out words, and you had to complete three columns.

I felt that my time was pretty fast, but could still be optimized slightly. Little did I know that I would get a purple zone finish in this puzzle! 

Puzzle 6: Maze Builder \ Score: 60 in 5:49 \ Placement: 113th

And then I basically didn't even try for this puzzle.

Maze Builder is similar to pentomino pathfinding, except with the following changes:

• You are given a start and end that cannot be changed.
• There are some additional walls in the grid that cannot be changed.
• There is a time limit. In this specific puzzle, the time limit is 30 minutes.

Here, a longer path from start to end beats out shorter paths regardless of how much time 

Also, another thing I should mention about this event is that your bottom 10 placements are not counted on the leaderboard. Meaning you can miss up to 10 puzzles before your score starts to get affected. And when I first saw this result, I thought that this placement would likely get dropped, assuming I do all the puzzles.

Puzzle 7: Masyu \ Time: 3:57 \ Placement: 59th

A bunch of the other participants in the event were scared of the genre.

I saw this puzzle as also being slightly harder than GAPP-level, and when I got my time, I thought I was doing pretty well. I'd say this is still "good" to my standards, but still not enough to reach the blue zone.

Puzzle 8: Gerrymandering \ Time: 2:02 \ Placement: 34th

This was another genre that I wasn't that good at. So I decided to do a bit of practice beforehand by watching Deckardv's 3-color gerrymandering video and solving a few practice puzzles. I thought I did pretty well after the puzzle, and thought my time was faster than what I would have gotten if I had done the puzzle blind (i.e., not done a gerrymandering puzzle since the last puzzle night).

Puzzle 9: True or False \ Time: 2:28 \ Placement: 5th

This genre is essentially a self-referential true-or-false quiz (i.e. the questions refer to each other). I found this puzzle to be rather easy with some bifurcation. I didn't think that many people would get screwed up due to the wording of this puzzle, but I was wrong, thus getting a higher score than I thought.

Puzzle 10: Statue Park \ Time: 4:27 \ Placement: 32nd

This puzzle wasn't that bad, but I did have to bifurcate a bit and sometimes got a bit unlucky.

Puzzle 11: Mangled Clues \ Time: 11:55 \ Placement: 42nd

See this puzzles.wiki page for more info regarding the rules of this puzzle.

This puzzle was... very difficult --- the hardest one so far in the gauntlet. But to compensate, we were allowed to use online resources such as Nutrimatic. Some of the clues were pretty obvious, while others were quite clever and took up most of my time to figure them out.

Puzzle 12: Numberlink \ Time: 1:22 \ Placement: 104th

This puzzle was dubbed "Flow" in the competition and shares the same rules. I found this puzzle to be easier than what I initially thought from before seeing it. But it turns out, a lot of other people thought the same thing.

Puzzle 13: Alphabet Soup \ Score: 11 words, 4-letter final word, 2 letters left in 11:22 \ Placement: 8th

In this genre, you're given a letter bank and have to form words from that bank that satisfy prompts, with the used letters getting removed. This goes until you can't form a word or reach the final round. Due to the nature of this puzzle, it took a while for results to come out.

Puzzle 14: Tentaisho \ Time: 16:08 \ Placement: 100th

I took longer than I should have here because I was focused on a case in the puzzle that wasn't possible.

Puzzle 15: Hidden Crossword \ Time: 3:52 \ Placement: 47th

In this genre, you get a board of letters, and you will need to highlight all the words that are present in the board. Then, you must look at the unused letters for a message.

I found this puzzle to be relatively easy compared to some of the other past puzzles.

Interlude \ Placement: 30th

This section isn't a puzzle, but rather a reflection on my progress in the gauntlet so far. At this point in the gauntlet, my placement was the very last in the blue zone, meaning if the gauntlet ended there, I would have just barely reached my goal.

But it didn't end there, as we get to do all the previous genres again!

Puzzle 16: Fitting In \ Time: 4:51 \ Placement: 51st

This puzzle was 100% harder than the first one, as given by the time taken on this puzzle.

Puzzle 17: Masyu \ Time: 9:28 \ Placement: 61st

Similarly to the 2nd Fitting In puzzle, this was quite a bit harder than the first Masyu puzzle.

Puzzle 18: Gerrymandering \ Time: 13:10 \ Placement: 122nd

Yeah, I think it's safe to say that most of the second half puzzles are quite a bit harder than their corresponding first half puzzles.

Puzzle 19: Missing Middles \ Time: 0:43 \ Placement: 5th

This puzzle used nine-letter words with 3 missing letters in each word, but was still relatively easy. Also you might've noticed that since I've already discussed the rules for some of the genres in the first half, there isn't too much information to share for the second half puzzles other than them being harder than the first half puzzles.

Puzzle 20: Star Battle \ Time: 5:54 \ Placement: 53rd

This puzzle wasn't that much harder than the first star battle. The only problem I really had was more of a me issue --- I (allegedly) left my mouse at home while moving in to uni. At least puzz.link still had the one-button option mainly for mobile solvers.

Puzzle 21: True or False \ Time: 9:52 \ Placement: 36th

This was a LOT harder than the first true/false puzzle. I did have to go through multiple bifurcation depths here, and got a bit unlucky with it.

Puzzle 22: Word Snakes \ Time: 11:39 \ Placement: 72nd

Again, this was quite a lot harder than the first puzzle, mainly due to there being "fake words" in the puzzle (i.e. words that you could make but were not part of the solution).

Puzzle 23: Maze Builder \ Score: 61 in 17:43 \ Placement: 105th

Yeah no this puzzle was bad

Puzzle 24: Statue Park \ Time: 10:49 \ Placement: 62nd

This puzzle wasn't THAT bad, but I did get a bit unlucky with trial and error here. At least I did a little better than I thought.

Puzzle 25: Mangled Clues \ Time: 11:58 \ Placement: 36th

This puzzle was roughly the same difficulty as the previous puzzle, but I could've gotten the extraction part earlier.

Puzzle 26: Nurikabe \ Time: 18:08 \ Placement: 99th

Yeah this puzzle was a total dumpster fire. I got unlucky with bifurcation, and even had to restart the puzzle once due to something being broken.

Puzzle 27: Numberlink \ Time: 12:21 \ Placement: 102nd

This puzzle wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Still hard, but again wasn't impossible to solve. I did also get a bit lucky with trial and error here.

Puzzle 28: Alphabet Soup \ Score: 11 words, 8-letter final word, 3 letters left in 18:32 \ Placement: 43rd

I did get quite scared about not being able to form words due to using specific letters early, but oh well I still made it to the final round.

Puzzle 29: Tentaisho \ Time: 13:22 \ Placement: 33rd

This puzzle claimed to be the hardest one of the entire gauntlet.

And upon opening the puzzle, I got some initial bits, but was left stuck. Until I decided to experiment with the shapes of one of the regions, which turned out to later solve the puzzle (i.e. for once I got very lucky with bifurcation). I honestly had no idea what happened there.

Puzzle 30: Hidden Crossword \ Time: 3:42 \ Placement: 33rd

Funny how the last four puzzles of the 2nd half were the same genres as the last four puzzles of the first half.

Anyways, this puzzle was roughly the same difficulty as the previous hidden crossword, and a bit larger.

Final Results

It all came down to this.

When the final results, I was revealed to have placed...

39th.

Well, it's still good. But it unfortunately was outside the blue zone by 9 places. But to be fair, there was quite a bit of room for improvement. GGs Stef (or as people called them near the end, "Sterf")!

Maybe I'll get blue zone in the next major Deckardv puzzle event, though...

Practice Puzzles

None lol but ig you could probably count Shreds of Words (42) as it's a missing middles even though it was made after both of the missing middles were done