We had 47 Object Placement puzzles (Star Battle and Battleships and other variations) this year.

The best Battleships puzzle was “Solved?” by Bram de Laat where a fleet of seas obeys the outside clues. Definitely one of the most original themes we had this year.

We’ve had a bunch of Pentomino placement puzzles and the highest rated was this Pentomino Minesweeper by Thomas Snyder.

There have been a lot of highly rated Star Battles this year. While it has not yet gotten a lot of solvers since it was posted just two weeks ago, guest contributor Carl Worth’s “Star Duel” has already earned a good number of FAVE votes.

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Not a lot of Monday/Tuesday puzzles got recognized this year with “best” ratings, but Zoltán Horváth’s Pentominoes theme fit the bill. (Full disclosure: Jiří Hrdina independently sent us a puzzle with this same theme earlier without Zoltán knowing. This puzzle was released this year as part of The Art of Puzzles book; Jiří’s Pentomino Star Battle would have probably earned a lot of FAVEs too if it had been on the web and not a book puzzle.)

The Best Object Placement puzzle of 2014 however went to a medium Star Battle with a very visual theme: “Man Made Out of Stars” theme by Thomas Snyder.

These best puzzles have been gathered in this PDF.

During these “gap” weeks I like to make updates to the website and WordPress. This morning you’ll notice a real change to the navigation on the sidebar which categorizes our many posts into puzzle genres. This should be much easier to use to find some of the less common puzzles. For instance, Grant’s Ripple Effect that was highlighted as a “Best Of …” yesterday before could only be found by searching deep in the Puzzle or Variation categories. Now it is cleanly with a handful of others in “Other Number Placement”.

There is also now a set of hard links to the different puzzle authors, which makes a hidden feature a lot more obvious.

This update did change our blog’s style.css sheet so you may need to do a hard refresh of the page for everything to display as intended.

Because of the mainstream popularity of Sudoku (née Number Place) and its variations, we’ve kept Sudoku separate from the rest of the Number Placement category historically. But due to this split, both Sudoku and Number Placement are our smallest categories, each with 34 entries this year. Today we are announcing our best Number Placement puzzles of 2014:

TomTom puzzles add some math onto the Latin Square frame familiar from Sudoku, and one of our Toms wrote the best classic TomTom of the year. This “Count-Up” puzzle from Tom Collyer started the year off well:

Skyscrapers is our other major Number Placement genre at the moment. This Sums Skyscraper by Thomas Snyder, “Going Up?”, received a lot of faves. Is there something to puzzles with “up” themes getting highly rated this year?

We’ve only posted one Ripple Effect puzzle on this site, but it was a rare gem from Grant Fikes and very highly rated.

Our two best number placement puzzles were both “new” TomTom variations. John Bulten, a guest contributor to GMPuzzles, came up with a rather original “clueless” TomTom:

In the end, the highest rated Number Placement puzzle (and one of three puzzles that tied for FAVES for Puzzle of the Year) was the TomTomTom by Thomas Snyder, his 200th contribution for the site:

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All of the Best Number Placement puzzles of 2014 are collected in this PDF.

There will be no new puzzles this week as we look back on the last 51 weeks (and 326 puzzle posts) at GMPuzzles. Over the next six days we will be presenting our “Best of 2014″ selections, using data from the FAVE button at the bottom of each post. Because of a variable number of solvers over the year (and even over each week), the selection process included raw FAVE counts, FAVE/solver ratios, and internal discussions when those values brought up ties. Today, we present the BEST SUDOKU:

While we had fewer sudoku than last year due to a wider variety of puzzles, the sudoku we posted still received rather high ranks.

The best Classic sudoku from last year was Flyers by Thomas Snyder (aka Dr. Sudoku), a hand-crafted sudoku where getting just one digit is quite a challenge:

Thermo-Sudoku is a frequent variant here and this “June Sun” puzzle also by Dr. Sudoku was the highest rated standard variant:

This combination of Thermo-Sudoku and Skyscrapers from Hans van Stippent, with zero given numbers, earned a very high ratio of FAVEs from its solvers:

2014 brought a new contributing puzzlemaster to the website, and Prasanna Seshadri’s sudoku contributions frequently rose to the top of the charts. As a new variation, this “Hamle Sudoku” was very highly rated:

Overall, the highest marks went to another puzzle from Prasanna, one that I both rejected and accepted. Originally created for Prasanna’s Sudoku GP round in 2014, this Basement Skyscraper Sudoku puzzle had to be cut from that competition for reasons of time/difficulty and for having a higher emphasis on Skyscrapers (a puzzle genre) and not just Sudoku. Fortunately, this “reject” got a chance to shine on our website as a really elegant puzzle, and our Best Sudoku of 2014:

All of these best sudoku can be found in this PDF.

Please come back later today for the first in our “Best of 2014” entries. Our supercomputers (read: Thomas, working with a spreadsheet and some graphs) are crunching the numbers as we speak to bring you this exciting summary of the last year at Grandmaster Puzzles.

All the Pentomino puzzles from last week can be found in this PDF.

Instead of new puzzles, this coming week will highlight our best rated puzzles of 2014. Have you liked what GMPuzzles has offered over 2014? How do you want to see our site grow over the next year?

PDF

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools).

Theme: Clue Symmetry and Logic

Author/Opus: This is the 62nd puzzle from our contributing puzzlemaster Prasanna Seshadri.

Rules: Standard Pentopia rules: Place some of the given pentominoes in the grid so that no pentominoes are in adjacent cells that share an edge or corner. Pentominoes cannot repeat in the grid; rotations and reflections of a pentomino are considered the same shape. The arrow clues indicate all the directions (up, down, left, and right) where the nearest pentominoes are located when looking from that square. (Arrow clues cannot contain pentomino shapes.) Also, see this example:

Answer String: Enter the length in cells of each of the shaded pentomino segments from left to right for the marked rows, starting at the top. Separate each row’s entry from the next with a comma. The example has the solution “21,23”.

Time Standards (highlight to view): Grandmaster = 6:45, Master = 9:00, Expert = 18:00

Solution: PDF; a solution video is available here.

Note: Follow this link for more Pentopia puzzles and this link for other puzzles involving Pentominoes.

PDF

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools; use tab to alternate between a composite mode for line/edge drawing and a letter entry mode.)

Theme: F is for Fiendish

Author/Opus: This is the 4th puzzle from guest contributor Carl Worth.

Rules: Divide the grid into 20 pentominoes so that no two pentominoes of the same shape (including rotations/reflections) share an edge. A cell with a letter in it must be part of the pentomino shape normally associated with that letter. An inventory of possible pentominoes is given below the puzzle.

Answer String: Enter the letter associated with the pentomino occupying each cell in the marked rows from left to right and in the marked columns from top to bottom, separating the groups with a comma. Use CAPITAL LETTERS!

Time Standards (highlight to view): Grandmaster = 4:30, Master = 10:00, Expert = 20:00

Solution: PDF

Note: Follow this link for other Pentominous puzzles. If you are new to this puzzle type, here are our easiest Pentominous to get started on.

PDF

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools).

Theme: Clue Symmetry and Logic (or Empty Middle)

Author/Opus: This is the 61st puzzle from our contributing puzzlemaster Prasanna Seshadri.

Rules: Standard Pentopia rules: Place some of the given pentominoes in the grid so that no pentominoes are in adjacent cells that share an edge or corner. Pentominoes cannot repeat in the grid; rotations and reflections of a pentomino are considered the same shape. The arrow clues indicate all the directions (up, down, left, and right) where the nearest pentominoes are located when looking from that square. (Arrow clues cannot contain pentomino shapes.) Also, see this example:

Answer String: Enter the length in cells of each of the shaded pentomino segments from left to right for the marked rows, starting at the top. Separate each row’s entry from the next with a comma. The example has the solution “21,23”.

Time Standards (highlight to view): Grandmaster = 4:15, Master = 5:30, Expert = 11:00

Solution: PDF

Note: Follow this link for more Pentopia puzzles and this link for other puzzles involving Pentominoes.

PDF

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools; use tab to alternate between a composite mode for line/edge drawing and a letter entry mode.)

Theme: Funny Tulip?

Author/Opus: This is the 15th puzzle from guest contributor Murat Can Tonta.

Rules: Divide the grid into 20 pentominoes so that no two pentominoes of the same shape (including rotations/reflections) share an edge. A cell with a letter in it must be part of the pentomino shape normally associated with that letter. An inventory of possible pentominoes is given below the puzzle.

Answer String: Enter the letter associated with the pentomino occupying each cell in the marked rows from left to right and in the marked columns from top to bottom, separating the groups with a comma. Use CAPITAL LETTERS!

Time Standards (highlight to view): Grandmaster = 1:45, Master = 2:45, Expert = 5:30

Solution: PDF

Note: Follow this link for other Pentominous puzzles. If you are new to this puzzle type, here are our easiest Pentominous to get started on.