30th Birthday Surprise by Prasanna Seshadri
From Prasanna: “This puzzle is meant to be a culmination of 10 years of authoring puzzles. I want to especially thank GMPuzzles for accommodating these special puzzles every year even if it may not have fit the regular schedules. I also see this puzzle as a “reset” of sorts, and I’ll get back to simple ideas to celebrate my next few birthdays, and then see where that takes me. These last 10 years have been a fantastic experience and I’d like to take this moment to thank the puzzle community as a whole for being a huge part of my journey.”
(view directly for a larger image)
or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools; note that the default puzzle info is too long — even for an url shortener — so copy and paste all the text in this file into the “Load” option in the upper-right of the penpa-edit interface to access.)
Theme: The Journey
Author/Opus: This is the 201st puzzle from our contributing puzzlemaster Prasanna Seshadri.
Rules: Please see first two pages of the PDF for a detailed description of the rules and more background on the theme of the puzzle.
Difficulty: 5 stars?
Solution: PDF
Happy Birthday!
This is jaw-dropping. Happy birthday!
Happy birthday! Many thanks for all the puzzles and WPF work!
I’m pretty sure if I were to go back to each year’s installment, there will be a fawning comment posted by me. These are always such a treat, and this one caps them all. Thank you so much, and happy birthday!
Truly epic. It’s not right, though, you know? You’re supposed to get presents on your birthday, not give them. Really appreciated, though. I showed this to my wife, who knows I’m into puzzles, even though she isn’t, and she asked “How long do you think it took to build that?” I thought for a moment and replied, “I’d guess about thirty years…”
Make it a good one!
Here’s a Penpa version of the helper at the bottom of the pdf: https://git.io/JqUBE
Wow. This puzzle just blew my mind. Enjoyable all the way through. I’m quite new to puzzles so I only had any experience at all with 3 of the 9 puzzles, but I think confronting each rule set and finding out the quirks in each of them made it even more interesting. Plus the way they come together through the letters and the border interaction was great. Hats off and happy birthday!
P.S.: Congrats also to all other puzzle contributors. Great content!
Another staggering achievement. Enjoyed every minute solving it – so absorbing. Thank you Prasanna, and happy birthday.
Finishing this a bit late (as usual). A magical masterpiece (also as usual). Happy Belated B-day! -Loren