Here are our best Number Placement puzzles of 2018, selected from the 50 web posts in this category:

We haven’t had many puzzles from Palmer Mebane recently (in part it seems he mostly constructs for World Puzzle Championship preparation), but this WPC prep puzzle — Skyscrapers (with Sum Baskets) — has a very elegant logical solving path that our solvers appreciated.

Regular contributor and grandmaster Grant Fikes shared this Kakuro (Gapped) puzzle that also earned a good number of FAVE votes.

Murat Can Tonta won another best of award for this Thermo-Skyscrapers combination which, like some prior examples, avoided needing to give any given numbers to get its logical solution going. The presence of only three short thermos outside the grid was a cute new twist on this style.

Our runaway winner in the category though, and the runner-up for Best Puzzle of 2018, was this TomTom (Mystery) written by Thomas Snyder as his 300th post here on the site. [Breaking third-person self reference:] While I haven’t had the chance to write as many puzzles this year, focusing more on editing, it was great to receive recognition from so many of you for this milestone puzzle.

(view directly for a larger image)