low times

[MewZzz]

The under 30 was only 29 though lol

[AnthC1]

Yea I dont know anything about puzzles other than 8x1 because that is all I play but in terms of what I look at when I start the puzzle. The first thing I do is quickly scan the board for instant stars, what i mean by that is the 1x1 colors or the 2x1 next to another small shape that gives you a couple instant stars. From there I would solve the puzzle normally as that is usually enough to finish off the puzzle quickly. If I dont see something like that right away I always look for row/column stars. What I mean by that is finding chunks where there are one or a couple colors can only be within a certain amount of rows or columns due to them being "thin". This trick comes up a lot more often that you would think and its why I look for that first as I can almost always solve a puzzle starting from eliminating using that trick. If you are generally taking 20+ seconds to solve an average puzzle then you dont need to do this but once you want to get down to trying to average single digit you have to start including "guessing/intuition" not only to get lucky and solve puzzles very fast but it is now how I solve all puzzles as I find even if I mess up I can always use my guesses as a baseline and solve backwards from the mistakes. So if I go through the whole puzzle and solve it wrong in 8 seconds, usually only 1 or 2 stars are misplaced and once you have the whole board "solved" you can generally find the mistakes a lot faster than solving normally, thats generally how I do all 8x1 now, solving backwards. But for the longest time as I was trying to consistently get on the boards and get like 20-25 seconds I always fully placed dots, I only recently started not doing that and its significantly improved my times but I dont think that would have worked without the countless puzzles I did properly. Long story short just play a lot and you learn tricks.