With new styles Nanro and Kurotto joining Tapa, Nurikabe, Cross the Streams, and LITS this year, shading puzzles are now by far the most common style of puzzle we post at Grandmaster Puzzles (86 total posts in 2014). As a result, we’re going to give out a few more awards for the Best Shading puzzles than in the other categories.

Half of our “April Fool’s” week puzzles got very high ratings, including this Nanro from Prasanna Seshadri:

This LITS puzzle from Palmer Mebane also received a lot of praise for a simple but elegant solving theme:

Tapa continues to be one of our most popular puzzle styles, both in regular form or as a variation. We had three highly rated “best” Tapa puzzles this year. Amazingly, they all ended up using the same general theme. Will Shortz sometimes remarks that “As human beings, we have a natural compulsion to fill empty spaces.” Well, our favorite Tapa all featured impressive empty spaces that solvers would need to fill. Starting the year was this Tapa Triomino variation by Prasanna Seshadri called “Open Middle”:

Then in May came “Open Spaces” by Murat Can Tonta:

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Then in October, perhaps inspired by what came before, John Bulten provided “White Hole”:

While really a hybrid of a shading puzzle and a loop puzzle, Serkan Yürekli’s Nurikabe Loop “The Magic of 23” had the magic to make this list:

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Finally, we had some noteworthy Cross the Streams puzzles. Murat Can Tonta used a lot of just four basic clues in this masterpiece:

But the best Shading puzzle, and the last of the puzzles tied for Puzzle of the Year (with the TomTomTom, and the C Major Cipher Fillomino) was Grant Fikes’ audiobook form of a Cross the Streams puzzle. There isn’t really a puzzle to show here, just an MP3 link for you to hear.

All of the Best Shading puzzles for 2014 have been gathered in this PDF.

Region Division puzzles made up a total of 64 posts, and had some of the highest rankings of all of our puzzles making this an incredibly tight category.

One puzzle with a very high FAVE/solver ratio was this creative “Infinity!” Araf from Serkan Yürekli:

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While many of our best Cave puzzles were contained in our ebooks this year, Thomas Snyder’s Product Cave from January garnered a lot of Favorite votes:

Fillomino puzzles closed out our favorites of 2014. Arguably the best puzzle of the year was a giant Fillomino “Dear John” from Grant Fikes that went out to our patrons in April; these votes just cover our web puzzles though.

Tapio Saarinen made a cute Fillomino out of just tiny digits:

Guest contributor Robert Vollmert created a really challenging Checkered Fillomino with some interesting discoveries inside as well:

Closing out the best Region Division puzzles of 2014 were a pair of Cipher Fillomino from Palmer Mebane. Palmer’s not had a lot of interest in puzzle construction over the last couple years, but whenever he returns with new ideas they have been fantastic. Quoting from his email that submitted these two: “This is not really a return; just a couple good ideas that were too good (in my head) to leave undone.” While Tic-Tac-Toe got a lot of Fave votes, the C Major theme earned the most for Region Division puzzles and tied (with the TomTomTom and a puzzle to be named tomorrow) for Puzzle of the Year:

These best puzzles have been gathered in this PDF.

We had 59 loop puzzles in 2014 in several distinct genres.

One of the best Masyu puzzles was this classic “Dominoes” theme from guest contributor Murat Can Tonta:

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Another highly rated Masyu was this Deformable Masyu from Serkan Yürekli:

Three puzzles tied for the most FAVE votes and were separated based on the number of solvers to determine the order of the top 3. With 11 FAVE votes but the most solvers was a Slitherlink (Sheep and Wolves) by Thomas Snyder called “Surrounded!”:

In second, also with 11 FAVE votes, was one of the few puzzles we got from Palmer Mebane this year (almost all of which earned lots of praise). This Yajilin was actually a 2013 submission that we held onto until this year’s April Fool’s week for obvious reasons:

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And the best Loop puzzle of 2014, with 11 FAVE votes but many fewer solvers for a 30+% Fave/Solve ratio is this Castle Wall, also by Palmer Mebane:

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These best puzzles have been gathered in this PDF.