Schedule for Week 48
Last week’s puzzles are grouped together in this PDF.
This week will have a few more “regular” puzzles than the rest of November, but still some of the variety that we hope you have become thankful for over this year. And for the first time in a few weeks we will have all of our contributing puzzlemasters providing puzzles (to whom I am especially thankful for helping to grow GMPuzzles into an even more incredible site). Highlight to view the schedule:
Monday – Cross the Streams by Grant Fikes
Tuesday – Masyu by Tom Collyer
Wednesday – Sudoku by Thomas Snyder
Thursday – Battleships by Thomas Snyder
Friday – Easy as Japanese Sums by Serkan Yürekli
Saturday – Hexa Briquets by Palmer Mebane
Thanks for doing these groupings! I usually don’t have enough time during the week for puzzles, and it helps to have a bunch to print out. (It also makes it easier to print 2 to a page to save paper.)
I miss the one classic puzzle type + one sudoku variant days.
What aspect do you specifically miss most?
The focus on a smaller number of puzzle types (2) in a week so there is a genuine easy/medium/hard progressing in a style? If so is it the puzzle focus or the calibration of difficulty that matters more?
Is it having more “classic puzzles” compared to variations?
Is it having more number placement/sudoku puzzles each week as opposed to other genres?
Those old days were most representative of my puzzle construction which is about 50% sudoku and 50% other, so it is not easy to replicate with many authors. Nor is it my goal now. But it would be helpful to know if there are tweaks we can make that will improve your experience.
I’m not the only reader of this blog – so whatever the consensus prefer I’m fine with it! Surely, one can’t complain about the current contents – they’re great.
The aspect I miss most is definitely the weekday system (think crosswords in US newspapers). I know it’s loosely implemented now but there are so many puzzle types – standardizing benchmarks is impossible. So the only way to achieve that is to use to same puzzle types throughout the week, which is what Dr.Sudoku prescribes 1-60 were all about.
You’ve chosen the one aspect from my list of questions that I am most concerned about too — the lack of a well calibrated set of puzzle difficulties. With roughly six genres of puzzles, instead of trying to get one of each type to fit on some day of the week, we could go to a rotation that just focuses on “loop puzzles” for a week, and actually accesses the whole range better. While some solvers may therefore be more/less excited now by whole weeks, I think we have published enough puzzles that most people can go through “unsolved” material if they find a particular week does not suit their tastes. I’ll think about this idea more with our contributors as a new kind of plan for 2014. It definitely will be more friendly for “beginners”, and I worry the current format, unlike DSP 1-60, looks like an alien language to someone just encountering the site.
To cater beginners the old format was a lot easier to follow, to slowly grasp each type’s concept and to actually become better at that type.
I don’t know what a regular puzzler do when they hit the blogs for material, but personally I save a cache of puzzles and print them. Your weekly PDF collections are godsend in that matter. I just can’t imagine a person new to puzzles doing that though.