The Laboratorium : Chocolate-covered Puzzle Clusters

For those out there who like this sort of stuff, I'm putting up a link to some puzzles I recently wrote. Now that the competition they were for has been held, whatever trade secret intellectual property they were vested with has been nullified, and it's safe for me to open them up to public consumption. As puzzles go, these are sort of a light snack, pleasant but not especially filling. It's quite hard to make up really good puzzles, I'm discovering. On the one hand, it takes some kind of God-given creativity (a creativity I quite decidedly lack) just like any other creative endeavour. On the other hand, putting together a good crossword or a pictoral word search, say, takes a hell of a lot of work. The Set puzzle in this batch was a real bitch to put together -- two full evenings of staring at cards and methodically looking for sets -- and that was a walk in the park with what I know some other people have gone through to put together puzzles. And on the other hand, getting puzzle difficulty right is a real challenge, much larger than I realized. My admiration for the Kenny Youngs of this world, who can put together brutal combinatorial puzzles that have exactly 3 or 4 deep false trails (no deep false trails and the solution is entirely straightforward; more than a dozen and you're better off using a computer) has grown a lot from this, my first real run at designing puzzles.