Best of 2015: Number Placement Puzzles
Here are our best Number Placement puzzles of 2015 (excluding Sudoku which is treated as its own category).
Creating a complete puzzle taxonomy is challenging. Here at GMPuzzles we limit ourselves to just five logic puzzle categories, but that means our “number” placement term may seem a misnomer when you see logic puzzles with letters or words like our first winner here. At GMPuzzles, whenever a transformation of letters into numbers or other symbols could leave a fundamentally identical puzzle, we consider “Number Placement” to be the proper categorization. That said, this recent Scrabble variant from Murat Can Tonta — despite not yet having a lot of solvers — got a lot of Faves in December.
Our remaining “best” puzzles in this category are more obviously number placement puzzles; all received approximately the same number of votes. First is a classic Skyscrapers puzzle from Tom Collyer with a great solving path.
This Skyscrapers (Sum) variant by Thomas Snyder, part of a New Year’s week highlighting 2014 –> 2015, also received a lot of votes.
Finally, this Kakuro (Hex) from Serkan Yürekli was another of our best Number Placement puzzles of 2015.
Tom Collyer’s added some interesting comments on number versus object placement puzzles on his blog. There are definitely spots of overlap between these two genres — all placement puzzles belong to some super family — and we’ll revisit how to categorize these challenging cases in the future.