Hello there!

I've opened up a new area of the website (as you've seen!) which features a selection of different puzzle layouts to keep you entertained for longer. There are eight different layouts, with larger versions at the weekend, but they'll come up in a random order so you never know exactly what you might get on each day.

With all this being quite new be aware there may be bugs lurking in the code; if you encounter one just let me know via a forum post here. Of course, you do have to complete at least one puzzle here to be able to post.

Enjoy the new selection of puzzles.

What a welcome surprise during these unfortunate times! Thanks for taking the time to make this, foilman . I'm curious how the other Slither Link variants will look like.

(Incidentally, by pure random chance I seem to have been the first to find this section of the website. Amusing.)

Feedback:

I've enjoyed Slither Link variants in the past and look forward to what you've setup here. I expect puzzle difficulty and size will require some iteration to bring typical solving times on par with normal Slither Link puzzles. Something to think about in a few weeks once there are more puzzles and more data.

Splitting the forums and launching silently makes for an amusing surprise, but keeping the forums and post update notifications separate might be a problem in the long-term. I think rather than a separate forum, a few threads in the regular forum would probably suffice.

EDIT: There seems to be some kind of bug after posting or editing a reply in this forum. Once you click "post", the post is successfully created, but rather than getting sent back to the thread to see your reply, you instead see a white screen with the following URL: https://kwontomloop.com/forum.php
EDIT2: Another forum bug: If you use characters like quotation marks here, then edit the post multiple times, the forum creates HTML gibberish like this: "post", then this: "post", etc.

Thanks for the feedback! Hopefully those bugs you found are now squashed.

We'll see how the difficulty levels go - I was originally planning on spending more time improving the puzzle creation code to make the puzzles harder, but decided it was a good time to open up this part of the site now. I'd have opened it up earlier, but ironically being stuck at home has meant I've had less time not more, with two kids to help keep entertained!

Thanks Foilman. This is great

WHAT HOW LONG HAS THIS BEEN HERE oh okay

that was indeed a surprise

These puzzles are going to take a little getting used to, but they're fun. Stumbling in here totally made my day, so thank you, foilman.

I found another weird bug.

Say you have the site open in multiple tabs. You've opened e.g. the Variations forum, then use the dropdown menu in another tab to switch to the Standard site. If you then open the tab with the Variations forum and try to click a link, it will fail, loading a white page instead with error messages like "Edit post is missing" or "Can't find the topic".

The same happens the other way around, too, i.e. if you're browsing the Standard forums, then use another tab to switch the dropdown menu to Slitherlink Variations, all links in the Standard forum tab will fail, and all other links will open the Variations site.

And I haven't tried this, but I expect that if you were currently creating a new topic in the Standard forum, then switched to the Variations dropdown menu in another tab, and then clicked the "Post" button, the resulting thread would appear in the Variations forum instead.

I don't have any deep insight into why this happens, but I imagine using the dropdown menu flips a switch in a global browser cookie or something, thereby affecting the other tabs?

EDIT: This also leads to a related bug / issue: There's no way to link to posts in the other Kwontomloop forum, from either direction, nor from outside the website (e.g. while my dropdown menu is on Slitherlink Variations, all google links to the Kwontomloop forum are dead for me). And since links to both forums look identical, maybe link collisions are also possible, i.e. a link to thread #23 could load a different thread in either forum.

So obviously I am a fan of non-square variations

But I think even with practice the current size/difficulty of the daily puzzles will make them prohibitive to fit easily into a daily routine like the standard kwon-tom's do.
Even ignoring the mistake which meant I had to start over the Wednesday puzzle from scratch which basically doubled my time, I've spent as much time on 3 weekday dailies as I spent on a week inclusive of weekend puzzles on kwon-tom.

Maybe there's a way to quantify that in a different way than looking at the current solution times, which will eventually improve across the board.

To start with, puzzle size seems like an easy metric to calculate and work with. Rough calculation, double-counting edges for simplicity's sake:

Standard weekday puzzles are 10x10=100 cells à 4 edges, or 400 edges.
Standard weekend puzzles are 20x14=280 cells à 4 edges, or 1120 edges.

Tuesday Variants puzzle: 25x6=150 cells à 4 edges, or 600 edges.
Wednesday Variants puzzle: 10x12=120 cells à 5-6 edges, or 600-720 edges.
Thursday Variants puzzle: 25x6=150 cells à 5 edges, or 750 edges.

If the edge counts from these rough calculations are even vaguely proportional to puzzle size and solving times, then the current Variants weekday puzzles are 1.5 - 2x as big as the Standard weekday puzzles.

Oops I just realized I didn't actually read the OP - thanks for deleting my post on the original forums

Yes, good point! You are either in "standard" or "variations" mode and multiple tabs do confuse the issue. I can fix it, but it won't be a quick one...

Small issue: Something is wrong with the font colors / contrast on the Club page in the Variations section.

EDIT: And another one: On the Archives page, the Scores buttons don't seem to do anything in Variations mode, saying there are no archived leaderboards, whereas there are on the Standard page.

The club page should look better now. Leaderboards are only archived once there have been 7 puzzles (a full week's worth), so you won't see any yet - in theory this week they will start to appear!

Thank you so much for creating this.  I've had great fun doing the puzzles (badly) and I shall regard it as my job to make sure the bottom of the leaderboard works correctly!

Edit: For Saturday's grid, I decided to print it out and puzzle outside. The shape lines hardly print at all so I wondered if it might be possible to make them a little more distinct at some point?  Current workaround is to snapshot and adjust.

In theory you should now be able to have two browser tabs open, one on the "standard" site and one on the "variations" site, simultaneously, and it shouldn't get confused.

You'll still be redirected back to "standard" mode when a new puzzle comes out if you click anything though!

And you may need to switch between the two sites a couple of times initially if it doesn't seem to work.

Foilman, that "Hide background line when a cross is placed?" option is wonderful. Besides helping maintain much-needed clarity on big puzzles, it also frankly makes them more aesthetically appealing to solve.

I propose having it default to "on" for that reason. (Plus maybe nobody will turn it off, in which case you could just set that as the intended behavior later on and remove the option entirely.)

I've started trying out the hide background line for cross - and 95% of the time its amazing how much it helps point out the dead ends and forced options.
However slightly rarely I get in a case where I have so many crosses in an area that I suddenly lose the shape of the puzzle in an area and start to second guess whether the '1' applies to only its nearest edge, or also the next edge up and the split between is just a long edge with the x a bit further away...
I wonder if a very faint remnant of the line would be even better.

Or maybe the problem could be addressed from a different direction: many Slither Link apps have a feature where they color numbers in e.g. red if you put too many crosses or lines there. I don't miss this feature much in the Standard puzzles nowadays, but in the non-square grids of the Variants puzzles, it might be more helpful.

I don't know how tough this would be to implement, though. Plus there's a potential separate issue - it's a departure from the paper puzzles, so maybe some people wouldn't like it?

While there's no doubt that would make things easier, having the app point out your mistakes arguably crosses the line into computer-assisted solving. (similarly, some apps highlight the error if you try to submit an incorrect solution, but that's never been done here)

Foilman, have you thought about reducing the size of the variants puzzles somewhat? We now have 3 weeks' worth of data, and while everyone's times are improving, I still have the feeling that the puzzles are somewhat too time-consuming (due to size and/or difficulty).

To add to my comparison from before, this week e.g. the Thursday Variants puzzle is a 10x15 puzzle, while the Standard weekday puzzles are all 10x10. And the Sunday Variants puzzle is a 14x27 puzzle, while the Standard weekend puzzles are all 14x20. And both these puzzles use tilings with 4 edges per tile, so they're pretty much directly comparable to the Standard puzzles with square tiles.

Of course, the 10x10 and 14x20 dimensions from Standard don't necessarily have to be the benchmark, but they've worked well in the past. And while these exact dimensions don't always make sense in non-square tilings, I think they can be approximated quite well. For instance, the Sunday Variants puzzle could easily be 14x21 by cutting off six columns to the right (= two rows of hexagons).

Yes, I have thought about limiting the size of the puzzles to be more consistent, but in the end I decided I quite like the variation in size as well as layout. I know the weekly times will vary a lot depending on the selection of layouts over the seven days, so one week will not be directly comparable to another, but I think that's fine here in this sub-zone of the site.

There are currently eight different layouts, each with a different number of edges.

Here are the number of edges possible in weekday puzzles:
197, 239, 252, 280, 338, 339, 350, 432.

And the same for the weekend:
486, 601, 689, 751, 763, 783, 818, 837.

The number of faces possible in weekday puzzles:
90, 100, 100, 108, 108, 120, 150, 150

And the number of faces for the weekend ones:
180, 240, 270, 280, 300, 324, 342, 378

A standard "square" puzzle has 220 edges for a 10x10 and 100 faces, and a standard weekend puzzle has 594 edges and 280 faces.

So variations are almost always larger puzzles than the standard ones.