SPECIAL POST — A team from Japan won the 26th World Puzzle Championship, which ended Saturday in Bangalore, India. The U.S.A. and Germany finished second and third.

The three-day competition — a companion to the World Sudoku Championship, held earlier in the week — drew 169 contestants from 27 countries. Over three days, the competitors tackled more than 300 pencil-and-paper puzzles involving logic, numbers and pictures. There were no crosswords or other puzzles testing vocabulary or knowledge, so everyone could compete on an equal basis irrespective of language or nationality.

In some rounds, lasting up to 60 minutes, the puzzles were so challenging that many contestants scored zero points. Three example puzzles from the competition, not the hardest ones, appear below.

Among individual solvers, Japan’s Ken Endo was first, scoring 7,655 points, far ahead of Germany’s Ulrich Voigt (previous 11-time W.P.C. champion), in second place, with 6,782; and Kota Morinishi, also of Japan, in third, with 6,724. Each puzzle was worth 5 to 250 points depending on difficulty.