Today LinkedIn is launching a new daily game, Zip, which is their third logic game alongside Queens and Tango where we’ve helped design/edit the puzzles. Zip is a path-drawing game with simple rules: draw a path through all cells starting at 1, going up in order, and ending at the highest number. Some puzzles have a fully open grid while others, like this puzzle, include walls to embed different logical and visual themes.

PDF

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

Theme: Trail of Logic

Author/Opus: This is the 562nd puzzle from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku.

Rules: Draw a path through all cells in the grid by moving horizontally or vertically between adjacent squares. The path cannot cross itself or cross over any given walls. The path must start at the cell with 1, proceed through the other numbers in ascending order, and end at the cell with the highest value.

See also this example:

Solution: PDF and selected animation.

Note: Follow this link for other Loop/Path puzzles.

Note 2: Comments on the blog are great! For a more interactive discussion, please also consider using our General Blog Puzzle Discussion post on the GMPuzzles Discord.

I wanted to share a quick note to this community that I am a speaker at the first (to my knowledge) sudoku convention, SudokuCon, to be held in the Boston area early in April.

I will be contributing to two sessions:

Just One Cell Sudoku on Friday the 4th at 2 PM:
Like chess puzzles compared to full games of chess, Just One Cell Sudoku are short, bite-sized snacks of Sudoku logic where each grid has just one cell where a logical placement can be made. The “winning move” can be anything from a basic single to a more advanced chain of logical steps that finally unlocks the answer. We’ve created a playful set of these puzzles as a contest for everyone to enjoy.

and also
How to Solve Sudoku Like a World Champion closing out Saturday the 5th from 5:30-7 PM:
Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku, won three world sudoku championships (’07, ’08, ’11) in the early years of the Sudoku craze. Come hear stories from many years of competing, including what different sudoku championships entail, how to identify your strengths and weaknesses in solving sudoku, and ultimately train to get faster at solving under pressure. From tales of catching a sudoku cheater to the origins of Snyder’s own solving notation, this talk will take you deep inside the world of speed-solving and how top competitors think.

See more info including the full schedule at sudokucon.com. While I’m not as connected with the sudoku streamer community organizing the convention as you might expect, I look forward to meeting old friends and making some new ones in Boston.

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In terms of other site news, we’re still working hard on some external projects that will launch later this year, and we also hope to get back to releasing a few GMPuzzles collections of unreleased puzzles in ebook form in 2025 too. So keep occasionally checking here for news on what we are doing!