Since the end of last year, Serkan and I have been trying to chart a path towards a self-sustaining GMPuzzles, where our products are able to fully cover our payments to authors, editors, and testers to continue producing great content even when I’m unable to contribute as much. As part of this, we’ve gotten feedback from all of our grandmasters, many of our authors, and some of our solvers about what they like most about the site and want us to keep doing, and where they want us to improve. Thanks to those who shared their thoughts as we have built a path forward for 2023+.

A key focus has been to make a main product line that delights our current audience while growing the audience too, which partially means more accessible puzzles. We started by considering how to make our books better, which have our highest quality puzzles but lack the discussion/community aspects of our blog. Adding digital solving options and solution animations (and/or hints) are some of the steps we wanted to do to improve the books, which we implemented for our Starter Pack series in 2022 but nowhere else. But another missing thing was having the sense of connection to the authors and to the community when going through the puzzles in a book. While we tried adding discussion page links into our e-books in 2022, they did not get used much. This made us decide to combine the best of our books and blog, and turn them into one subscription product with daily puzzle release, as a possible new path for GMPuzzles.

Since that decision, we’ve been thinking about “what” should be in a subscription and “how” we should deliver the puzzles. Here we will introduce the “what”, with a future post to talk about the current “how” and the future for a puzzle platform.

Our subscription starts by expanding our daily puzzle releases to two puzzles each day from Monday to Saturday. One simple way to think of this is to consider our “regular” GMPuzzles blog weeks and add on a second track of 1 or 1.5 star difficulty puzzles in the same genres. This new track of puzzles is perfect for beginner solvers and also a “warm-up” for people with more experience before they do the harder puzzle on the same day because we all can forget the rules to some of these styles sometimes. The main part of a subscription will be these 12 puzzles from Monday to Saturday, the first releasing around 9 AM PT and the second releasing around 9:05 AM PT similar to our blog historically. All posts will include digital solving options and solution animations to step through the answer path.

Sundays will be a special day where we are now also adding in a rotation of different kinds of special puzzles. In alternating weeks we are planning to release:

• Giant puzzles or Sunday stumpers
• Puzzlemasters’ Workshop / new puzzle type set: typically a set of 3 puzzles in a style we have not featured before with one easy, one medium, and one hard in the set.
• Puzzle Hunt style puzzles: See some of our prior examples here: https://www.gmpuzzles.com/blog/category/other/puzzle-hunt/
• Paired/combination/other hybrid puzzles tied into given weeks, like four-way loop grids or a set with crypto constraints across grids or other unusual puzzle constructions that don’t fit in a normal weekday.

The Sunday puzzles should be something really special for our current audience, while the “warm-up” puzzle track should be something that helps grow our audience and adds some enjoyment for the current audience too. We may make a few of the Monday-Saturday puzzles (no more than 2 or 3) free to the public after a vote from our subscribers each week, with a bias towards making the easier puzzles the ones that get freely released. We may similarly give out some “gift subscriptions” for the easier track puzzles if we learn how to hit this mark — maybe each subscriber has a free gift sub to share with someone who has never bought a book from GMP.

A basic subscription will be for a three month “season” of puzzles, over 175 total puzzles, for $10 (US) total. Season 1: A Fresh Start, will run from July to the end of September, and we’ll be revisiting the details of what is in a “season” including contests, votes on new puzzles, themes, and so forth as we go. But it starts by looking like a collection of 13 web weeks with some extra on top, as described here.

Those are some of the basics, and we’re now through test solving for the first two weeks of puzzles. We’re resolving the final details for the “how” of subscriptions, and will open up the purchasing options sometime over this next weekend if we don’t run into any technical challenges. We’re excited to get publishing again, and hope you are excited for the start of subscriptions!

Thanks to those who’ve written recently to ask how things are going (both personally for me on this “sabbatical year” and with launching a GMPuzzles subscription service). We’re making progress in different ways, even if we’re taking different paths that we thought we would when we first set out goals for 2023 and progress comes in fits and starts.

On the subscription service, we’ve found from testing feedback that a Discord platform may not be the right technical solution to get started (although it is a good addition for puzzle-based communication and ideation). So we have tried to adapt an approach where we can use subscriptions into this WordPress blog to provide subscriber-only content, while expanding the number of puzzles we release in each week to try to offer something for our existing audience and for newer solvers. We are intending to launch this subscription as soon as the start of July if we can pass final integration tests, and will have some more details to share by the end of next week on this front. (Yes, we will go from no puzzles a week to 13+ puzzles a week very fast, but whenever you are able to subscribe you should be able to catch-up on the GMPuzzles you love.)

Today, for Summer Update #1, I wanted to bring attention to another large Grandmaster Puzzles project for this year which is the World Sudoku and Puzzle Championships that we are organizing in Toronto, Canada on October 15-22. We have gathered a great group of authors — most but not all from North America — and are hard at work creating unique individual and team round puzzles for this event, while also setting up different evening activities to make this a lot of fun for anyone who can attend. Our event website just went live earlier this week and we are now starting the registration process.

Alongside this WSPC, I do expect to restart some of my YouTube videos on different aspects of puzzles, including more stories/perspective from my time in puzzles like “What is a (sudoku/puzzle) competition?”, “How to train?”, “How to construct?” instead of just putting out individual solving videos. I will also have some non-puzzle videos on that channel, since part of this year has been watching out for myself and finding what big problems I want to be solving — where I don’t have any answers yet and still sometimes am closer to depression than I want to be, but am getting physically healthier to eventually be mentally healthier to then embark on my next big thing(s).

So with those teasers for upcoming events for me and for GMPuzzles, I want to wish you all a happy start to the summer!