AkashG23's Puzzle Locker

If I had to be honest, the absence of these might've been one of the reasons on why I haven't been posting on here. For a recap, these puzzle nights are hosted on  Deckardv 's puzzle server. I participated and placed...  10th  out of 27 participants, which was in the "blue" zone. (you can see my post on  Puzzle Night 3  to see the zone colors and placements). My goal was the "purple" zone, and I didn't achieve that goal... again, partially because of the lack of puzzle nights. This night had a few more common puzzle genres seen in these puzzle nights. Puzzle 1: Star Battle \ Time: 6:28 \ Placement: 11th The first puzzle was a moderate star battle (slightly harder than GAPP-level). A funny thing... my puzz.link UI was stuck in Japanese, but I still knew where most of the buttons were. I used quite a bit of bifurcation, though. Puzzle 2: Nurikabe \ Time: 1:51 \ Placement: 5th I only got this time because I used uniqueness in my solving process. 💀 That...

 I participated in a "puzzle night" (i.e. a speed solving competition) on Deckardv 's puzzle server! I didn't do that well, but here are some of my experiences. I placed 25th overall out of around 35 competitors, which was a bit disappointing for me, but not too bad for my first puzzle night. I felt like I had some fun solving the puzzles. There were only 5, consisting of both familiar and unfamiliar genres. I won't show the actual puzzles here, but I'll show my thought processes and experiences for them. Puzzle 1: Word Snakes \ Time: DNF \ Placement: 32nd Word Snakes is a genre where you have to find words on a grid, similar to a word search. However, the words are all paths instead of just horiz./vert./diag. lines. I got thrown off by a word that wouldn't fit any other words but eventually found the correct solution. Unfortunately, I was a few seconds too late to have my completion time counted. Puzzle 2: Gerrymandering \ Time: DNF \ Placement: 32nd Gerr...