New e-book: Grandmaster Puzzles Quarterly: Volume 4
Just released in our e-store is Grandmaster Puzzles Quarterly: Volume 4, our latest collection of original puzzles spanning multiple genres. This volume includes several familiar styles with the first extended section of Japanese Sums puzzles we’ve published, which will also be the style for this upcoming web week.
The full set of elegant and hand-crafted puzzles, coming from twenty-two of the world’s best puzzle designers, spans:
– 7 Even/Odd Sudoku and 4 Isodoku (Even/Odd)
– 7 Japanese Sums and 3 Easy as Japanese Sums
– 7 Minesweeper and 3 Minesweeper (Sudoku)
– 7 Nurikabe and 3 Nurikabe (Pairs)
– 7 Pentominous and 3 Pentominous (Cipher)
– 7 Castle Wall and 3 Castle Wall (Hex)
Is there a good place to ask for help with puzzles from the e-store? I realise videos would defeat the valid purpose of the paywall, but I’m working through the ebooks whenever I get a few minutes and want to be away from my computer and phone, and every so often I just end up completely flummoxed on puzzles and have to skip over them.
Hi David, This is a great question and maybe a place other readers will also have ideas. For our earliest books like The Art of Puzzles and Colossal Cave Collection, we did write out hints for every puzzle but this took a lot of time and it was not clear that all solvers would use them very often. It seems unlikely we’ll be able to write hints or film videos for all puzzles in advance of future book releases.
In other situations, having private chat groups (like a Discord server) might help here — and this may already be where some conversation happens but we’re not aware of it, and we don’t expect to moderate our own Discord server.
But if we found a way to at least know what puzzles were stumping our solvers (to get “can anyone help here?”) type messages in one place, and then having hints written back from us or from other solvers, we could eventually put those hints into each book. Maybe we can make an unlisted “page” on our blog for each book, the link contained in the front of the book, and questions / hints on any puzzle can be added there over time.
Happy to hear other ideas for things we could try.
I actually loved the hints that were in the earlier books! In part because it was always impressive as a new solver that authors were able to very accurately predict what the sticking points would be (though now that I know more about what construction looks like it makes more sense).
I think the idea of having a page on the blog per book for hints is a good one. And then the replies can be used for questions.
Out of curiosity, how long did hint-writing take per puzzle? I’d imagine that it’s much shorter than writing the puzzle itself, and that it would be even faster once people get some practice doing it regularly. Could it just be a new part of the submission process to include a hint (at least for ones that end up in the e-books)?