New e-book: Shading Variety Collection by Prasanna Seshadri
We’ve just published our next e-book, the Shading Variety Collection by Prasanna Seshadri. In this book, the five shading puzzle styles Canal View, Nurimeizu, Heyawake, Aqre, and Yajisan Kazusan receive the Grandmaster Puzzles treatment with elegant, hand-crafted puzzles by Prasanna. There are a total of 54 puzzles, with 10 or 11 in each of the styles; you’ll surely get a workout in shading cells as you learn how to advance from the easy beginning grids to the very hard and large concluding puzzles.
This upcoming week of puzzles will feature original puzzles (not from the book) across these five puzzle styles.
Looking forward into digging into this collection. One comment though: is there any way for you guys to come up with a consistent difficulty rating system across books? I note this one uses one to five stars, while other books will use Very Easy to Very Hard. It gets confusing tracking how hard something is supposed to be without any consistency.
Thanks.
I tried different notations to see which option was better to illustrate the difficulties. It seems better to use the “stars” for the difficulty levels. Because when we use expressions like “Very Hard”, it doesn’t seem to give the exact range. Moreover, using the star notation will also match the difficulty notation we use on the web side. So, we’ll most likely go with the stars.
To add to Serkan’s comment, there are probably some comparison ranges we can give to these sets. Very Easy ~1-1.5, Easy ~2-2.5, Medium ~2.5-3 (more potential overlap here), Hard ~3.5-4, Very Hard ~4.5-5. These are good correspondences but not perfect across all genres/situations.
I’m excited for this book!
One quick formatting suggestion: could you put the genre of puzzle on each page instead of just as a title of a section? If you look at any individual page, it’s hard to know which genre you’re currently doing other than by formatting clues. I print the pages and toss them as I finish (and I don’t always go in order), so if I come back to a page later, it would be nice to be able to quickly look at it and go “Okay, Canal View puzzles. Got it.”
Thomas did this in GPQ Vol. 1, then we continued in GPQ Vol.2. But I never thought of it the way you mention. In books of more than one genre, it seems logical to show which genre is on the page. I noted that, thank you.
Thanks Scott for the feedback. I can probably do this as a quick fix for this book, and that would send an updated PDF to everyone who has already purchased it (and have it updated for future solvers). I had caught this kind of thinking on other books (to make sure styles looked visually distinct) and it is obviously not true for Aqre and Heyawake that sit close together in the book.
The formatting of the footers has been updated to include puzzle style on the page; anyone downloading the PDF again (or buying now for first time) will see this change reflected.
Really excited for this, and also to see an increased variety of puzzles on the main site.
Awesome! I already printed so it’s just the minor-est of minor inconveniences for me, but I bet other people will appreciate it! Great puzzles so far.
Love the site and all the puzzles you guys publish. Have you considered digital versions of your e-books that could use the Penpa-Edit tool?
It’s definitely a goal for us; right now I don’t think Penpa-Edit in default mode has a good “collections” mode to interact with a set of puzzles but that is a goal to explore this year. I put some more thoughts about this in a Penpa-related post from a few weeks ago.