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Hmm... I'm afraid that I may be in an airplane on Sept 20 during those hours... But good to hear there will be a Dutch championship again this year.

Dear puzzles and puzzle makers! The moment of truth is upon us. We will not leave you in suspension any longer. Not that the winner is likely to be very much in suspension anymore, if he knows anything about deduction by elimination. Nonetheless, I am proud to present to you...
the winner of the PuzzlePicnic.com 5th Anniversary Puzzle Design Contest...

Valezius!

He shaped this Fillomino puzzle after the PuzzlePicnic logo, and only used the digit 5 in his design. Furthermore, the pattern of the clues is symmetric in the main diagonal, but the shape of the domain breaks the symmetry and actually causes a quite asymmetric solution. We were impressed with the way these three quite restrictive design choices still led to a unique puzzle, which is even quite fun to solve, needing some global insight complemented with more traditional local fillomino logic.

Congratulations to Valezius and the other winners! And once again, thanks to all the participants. It's been fun to solve your puzzles.

Ladies and gentlemen! As we are getting closer and closer to the winner of the anniversary design contest, let us pause today to admire a very interesting fillomino by Shvegait. In this puzzle, we see a mirror symmetry between places with clues and places without clues. What's more, without revealing too much, I can say that the solution contains a very familiar hidden pattern.

Most importantly, even with these two restrictions, Shvegait managed to construct a puzzle that is fun to solve, and requires some different types of logic.

Congratulations Shvegait on your 4th place!

Lord_Farin wrote:

You have mixed up the references to the puzzles...

should be good now!

Hello again! I couldn't be more pleased to give you no less than two new submissions to our 5th anniversary contest today.

In the contest rules we specified two themes: "PuzzlePicnic's 5 year anniversary" and "antisymmetry". We noticed that it was quite challenging to combine both themes in a single puzzle, and many submissions focussed on only one of the two themes. Todays puzzles are an example of this.

On the one hand, we have a sudoku by Akademik, where we see an interesting interpretation of the antisymmetry theme: in each pair of centrally opposite 3x3 boxes, the clues are placed in the same pattern, but the pattern has been rotated and/or mirrored. Also, in the solution, the central box displays... but I shouldn't spoil it for those of you who still want to solve the puzzle. On the other hand, this masyu by NikolaZ focussed purely on the anniversary theme and features one big bicoloured 5.

Thanks to Akademik and NikolaZ for your efforts, and we hope to see more puzzles from you in the future!