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The 30th World Puzzle Championship had five “mini-playoffs” to determine the top solvers in five different genres. The puzzles were designed to be on the easier side, able to be solved in marker on an easel, and sometimes themed with “trophy” shapes or important championship numbers like 30 and 23. Today we’ll be releasing the Number Placement puzzles starting with this TomTom puzzle by Thomas Snyder.
or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools)
Author/Opus: This is the 458th puzzle from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku.
Rules: Standard TomTom rules, using the integers 1-6.
Estimated Difficulty: 2-2.5 stars
Solution:PDF for all Number Placement playoff puzzles.
Note: Follow this link for classic TomTom and this link for TomTom variations. If you are new to this puzzle type, here are our easiest TomTom to get started on. More TomTom puzzles can be found in these books in our e-store.
The final puzzle for the World Sudoku Championship playoffs is a tricky classic Sudoku with a trophy theme by Thomas Snyder. It was designed to have a narrow solving path at the sticking point, although speed solvers might choose to “bifurcate” to go faster as happened in the competition.
Note: Follow this link for other classic Sudoku. If you are new to this puzzle type, here are our easiest Sudoku to get started on. More Sudoku including variations can be found in these books in our e-store.
The eighth playoff puzzle for the World Sudoku Championship playoffs, reflecting the unusual grids of the “Grid-Breaking” round, is this Isodoku by Thomas Snyder.
or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools; use tab to alternate between Sudoku entry modes and a shading mode to mark off clues.)
Theme: 16th WSC
Author/Opus: This is the 455th puzzle from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku.
Rules: Standard Outside Sudoku rules: Insert a number from 1 to 9 into each cell so that no number repeats in any row, column, or bold region. Some numbers are given outside the grid. These numbers must appear in the first three cells in the corresponding direction.
The fourth World Sudoku Championship playoff puzzle was this Diagonal Sudoku from Thomas Snyder with a “16” theme. All the playoff puzzles represented different themed sudoku rounds and this one represented the Extra Toppings round with extra-region-type constraints.
This week we are sharing the 10 puzzles that decided the World Sudoku Championship this year. The first puzzle was a classic Sudoku with a ’23 theme and a split of even/odd digits.
Note: Follow this link for other classic Sudoku. If you are new to this puzzle type, here are our easiest Sudoku to get started on. More Sudoku including variations can be found in these books in our e-store.
It was a little over six months ago that I posted my “taking a sabbatical” letter here as part of a time I stepped away from full time science work. I’m still going through this sabbatical year, initially focusing on my physical health/wellness and more recently reengaging in different ways including with puzzles.
It has not been a straight path to find answers, but I’m doing fine, emerging from some depression in recent weeks, and signs like our GMPuzzles subscription starting with very cool puzzles coming through are some accomplishments I’d claim after 6 months. I am still assembling one mission from my different life goals (including, but not only, around mental health) which is now where the next 6 months may take me. I ultimately hope to assemble a renewed mission where puzzles and science and philosophy and a lot of things come together as a way Dr. Sudoku and my network solves for hard problems again.
I recently released two YouTube updates as a longer form of “how is Thomas doing” than the message above. The warm-up/easier video is about a trip to the National Puzzlers’ League Convention in Montreal and it came with this bonus puzzle packet of Tile Crosswords and TomTom. Some more fun easter eggs/check-in discussion begins about 18 minutes in. I hope it can put a smile on some faces if you at least used to laugh at my old livejournal Thomas self.
The more detailed and difficult video, including a perspective on my past science career and what could follow as well as more on my search to understand my bipolar brain, is here.
I don’t expect to put too much more on the GMPuzzles front page about these topics, but I have other channels I will share my thoughts in, including a lot of diverse content for YouTube. It’s been a challenging but enlightening year, and I want to thank you all again for your thoughts and messages as part of my extended family of puzzles. I’m excited for what is to come for the rest of 2023, including the World Sudoku and Puzzle Championship, and then new science/life/bigger things in 2024+.
We’re now almost through the third full week of our puzzle subscriptions and the response continues to be great. We’ve opened up three more puzzles that were “favorites” on the easier track of puzzles from our subscriber votes, including a pairedset of TomTom from Grant Fikes and a warm-up Thermo-Sudoku by Serkan Yürekli. If you haven’t come back to regular GMPuzzles solving yet, please consider purchasing a Season 1 subscription and experiencing the rest of the puzzles with many other puzzle lovers.
As additional news, two of our book projects (the Puzzlecraft series that Thomas Snyder co-authored with Mike Selinker, and Intro to GMPuzzles by Serkan Yürekli) are in a special 2023 Game Design Puzzlecraft Humble Bundle benefitting Active Minds, a mental health charity. There are many tremendous books available as part of this Humble Bundle so please check it out.
On this site we showcase “The Art of Puzzles”, with hand-crafted logic puzzles by the best puzzle designers for all who love puzzles. We organize into the categories of Sudoku, Number Placement, Object Placement, Shading, Region Division, and Loop/Path puzzles with tags on each post to find the easiest/hardest within particular styles.
We are currently not posting many new puzzles in 2025 after 12 years of offering so much to the puzzle community. We may have some bonus puzzles from time to time if you keep checking back. There are also many extra puzzles in our subscriptions and books that you may not have seen so check out our Store for more details.
If you are a subscriber for any of our seasons since July 2023, please use this page to login and make sure you see all content.
We’re excited to announce the start of our first subscription season of GMPuzzles. Please go to our store to purchase the 3-month, 175+ puzzle subscription for July-September. You will immediately receive one week of puzzles by download as well as instructions to register an account on the blog (after which you should be able to see the same week of puzzles in your gmpuzzles.com/blog view right away too). The next week of daily puzzles will start posting on Monday, July 10th.
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The rest of this post will talk a little about our journey to figure out “how” to implement subscriptions where we’ve already covered the “what” in an earlier post.
