The blog for the World Puzzle Championship has a post today announcing that there are 49 days left until the competition.  The post also features a collection of all of the puzzles used in the Belarusian and Russian Puzzle Championships.  These puzzles were constructed by many of the authors who will be contructing the puzzles for the main competition.

The 2007 Google US Puzzle Championship is coming up this month.  The competition will be held at 1PM EDT on June 16th and, as always, puzzlers compete from their own homes (or wherever they choose.)  To compete, you need to register by June 14th.  Winners will represent the US in the World Puzzle Championship held in Brazil this year.  As always, it will be fun just competing in the competition as the puzzles are sure to be great.  The puzzles from past competitions can be found here.

WPC 2006 is over and the individual winner is Ulrich Voigt of Germany who won for the second straight year and for the fifth time over all.  The competition is only in its 15th year, which means Ulrich Voigt has won one third or all World Puzzle Championships.

Team USA took the team championship, it’s ninth.  Three of the four team USA members finished in the top 5 for individual rankings.

There’s plenty of good info about the event at the WPC 2006 site and the Team USA site.

A post over at Puzzle Ratings has reminded me that the World Puzzle Championship started this weekend in Bulgaria and will be continuing until Oct. 12.  Partial results are already available and it looks like Thomas Snyder has taken the early lead, with team USA leading all countries.

Puzzle creator Cihan Atkay wrote two puzzles that appeared in this year’s Google US Puzzle Championship test.  On his blog, he’s posted four puzzles that were not included and they’re pretty interesting.

• Folding Sudoku - I’m not surprised that this wasn’t included since it requires solvers to cut the grid out of the paper and fold it.  (Scissors are not on the USPC allowed list.)  Still, it’s a very original sudoku variation.  I’m not sure that I entirely get it, though.
• Numberless Kakuro - Digits are replaced with letters.
• Cardboard - Requires you to fit abbreviations of former WPC hosts into a grid.  Puzzles like this show up in Atkay’s PQRST newsletter.
• Loop Lengths - Draw a single closed loop on a grid.  The loop must enclose the letters required to spell the loops length.

The winner of the 2006 Google US Puzzle Championships is Thomas Snyder who scored 270 out of a possible 285 points.  Wei-Hwa Huang finished second with 369.  Interesting to note, Thomas and Wei-Hwa were the second and third place winners in the World Sudoku Championships.  Zack Butler, who won the US Puzzle Championship last year placed third.  These three and Roger Barkan make up the US team this year.

So, the instructions are out giving us a tate of what the test will be like. There will be a distance puzzle on the test, and 3 sudokus by my count. It’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the puzzle types before you start. And you might want to make sure you know what exactly rotational symmetry is, or the formula for calculating a balance around a fulcrum point.

Erich Friedman’s site is always good to check out. In addition to examples of distance and weight puzzles, you will also find battleship puzzles and full hex puzzles. One of each will be on the test.

If you did last years test in preparation, you should be in good shape generally. This year’s test looks similar. The arrow ring puzzle recently mentioned on Zotmeister will be in this year’s test as well.

The most interesting twist is a kakuro variation that also includes negative numbers. Happy puzzling all.

On this coming Saturday, June 17th, the Google US Puzzle Championship will be taking place.  In order to participate, you have to register before before Thursday June 15th.  You also need to block out two and a half hours starting at 1PM EDT.  The winners will represent the US in the World Puzzle Competition in Bulgaria.

If you want to get an idea of what the competition is like, they have a number of tests from previous years.