Shading puzzles are amongst our favorite puzzles here at GMPuzzles. They are our most crowded category amongst non-Sudoku styles as we now regularly offer four puzzle styles in this genre. But this shouldn’t be a huge surprise; when you have the original designers of Tapa (Serkan Yürekli) and Cross the Streams (Grant Fikes) as contributors, you’re going to see a lot of shading puzzles.

Because of the crowded genre, and many high vote recipients (this is our most popular category!), we awarded six puzzles the “Best of” status for 2013.

While a bit of a novelty, the Tapa Group Think by Serkan Yürekli which we posted in September was definitely enjoyed by a number of solvers.

The variation Tapa (Pentomino) from Dr. Sudoku also received a large number of votes in this category.

An absolutely spectacular Cross the Streams, Two Hard!, happened during Grant’s first week on the site. A lot of solvers gave it two thumbs up.

Nurikabe was the home to the most top ranked puzzles in this category, though. Tied for 2nd amongst the Nurikabe were the 72nd Prescription from April

and the Nurikabe Time puzzle from the second week of January which is the second “clock” theme to make the top of the listings.

But the winner of the category, with a few more votes than any other puzzle, was the “Crypt-Oceanography” variation written by Dr. Sudoku in May. Our test-solvers will remember well that this Nurikabe Cipher puzzle went through a few drafts before it was just right*.

You’ll find all of these excellent shading puzzles gathered together in this PDF.

* (That the world changed its four ocean model to a five ocean model in 2000 did not change the way Dr. Sudoku counts the oceans. Similarly, any planetary themed puzzles are still likely to include Pluto if it helps the logic.)

As we start to celebrate 2014, let’s look back at some of the best object placement puzzles from the last year. This genre involves placing things into a grid, usually with specific touching rules driving the bulk of the logic. We had 39 puzzles in this genre last year, and one runaway winner for best puzzle. First, the very good (but not the very best) in the category:

Battleships (Yajilin) was one of Grant’s early contributions here and, with a set of battleship pieces in the grid as Yajilin clues was quite clever and well received. (The doubled battleships aspects of the theme pushed it into the object placement and not loop categories.)

Shipping Lanes from May was also highly rated. This Battleships puzzle was actually one of two created with this title/general theme in 2013; the other was kept for The Art of Puzzles (and if Dr. Sudoku ever gets his act together to publish this you’ll get to see it too!).

Amongst regular-sized Star Battles, Tom’s Throwing Star from September was a recent puzzle with a fair amount of favorite votes (or favourite votes, as he’d have us spell it).

The super-sized Clown from August got a good number of votes too among the Star Battles, over a quarter of the solvers who finished it marked it a favorite which is the best ratio in the category.

But the puzzle with over 50% more votes than any other, the one that certainly went most outside the box in the category, was Grant’s Star Battle (Corrupted Regions). I’m sure you had the same reaction I did to reading the rule “Each region must contain some number of stars other than 2, including possibly no stars at all” — there’s no way that will work. And then it does. It may be a one-off puzzle, but it is the Best Object Placement Puzzle of 2013.

This PDF contains the Best of Object Placement category for 2013.