You can find our first week of puzzles for 2018, a hard variety mix by guest Joseph Howard, in this PDF.

This year we will more regularly post weeks that focus on one puzzle style (with 4-5 classic puzzles and 1-2 variations of the style) with a complete range of very easy to hard puzzles. For our next week the focus will be on Slitherlink.

This week, Master+ subscribers to the site are also getting two bonus puzzles: an easy Slitherlink by Grant Fikes and a hard Crosslink by John Bulten, as well as puzzle solutions. If you want to become a subscriber and get access to bonus puzzles, solutions, e-books, and other rewards, check out this page.

You can find our “Best of 2017” puzzles gathered in this packet.

This year we are going to be cycling between one variety week and then two focused weeks. We kick off our 2018 schedule tomorrow with a (hard) variety week of puzzles from guest author Joseph Howard. The puzzles start out around “Wednesday” level and go up from there.

Our next two weeks (starting 1/22 and 1/29) will feature a single Loop genre and then a single Object Placement genre and there will be a more complete range of very easy to hard puzzles.

This week, Master+ subscribers to the site are also getting two bonus puzzles: a Statue Park by Murat Can Tonta and a Roller Coaster by Joseph Howard, as well as puzzle solutions and a video talkthrough of the Saturday puzzle. If you want to become a subscriber and get access to bonus puzzles, solutions, e-books, and other rewards, check out this page.

Here are the two best Sudoku puzzles of 2017, as well as our best “Extra” puzzles. We only had 13 Sudoku posted this past year but will have many more in 2018.

One of our patrons requested this unique combination of Arrow, Shape, and Thermo-Sudoku by Prasanna Seshadri, and it was a fantastic puzzle.

The highest-rated Sudoku for 2017 was this challenging Killer Sudoku by Serkan Yürekli.

In addition to our usual puzzles, we sometimes had larger combinations, hidden puzzles, or puzzle hunt style puzzles. Both of the below “extras” got top marks from our fans.

Prasanna returned for his usual “Birthday Surprise” on March 2nd with this combination of Yajisan-Kazusan and Tapa.

Our other best Extra puzzle was “Border Patrol” by Thomas Snyder, a puzzle hunt puzzle without any instructions.

With that, we’re done with the Best of 2017, and you can find all of the puzzles in this PDF.

Here are our best Object Placement puzzles of 2017, selected from the 17 posts over the year. While this style did not feature as often as others in 2017, it includes our runaway vote winner for Puzzle of the Year.

One of the best object placement puzzles of this year was a gem that only our patrons got to see. Murat Can Tonta, practicing the art of Statue Park, made a memorable antisymmetric puzzle. If you want to see all our web puzzles, subscribe to GMPuzzles.

This Battleships by Thomas Snyder was not necessarily meant to have a long shelf life — it was constructed for one specific day — but our solvers enjoyed it and gave it several FAVEs to make the top list.

The best Object Placement puzzle of the year, and also the overall Best Puzzle of the year, goes to this Star Battle by Thomas Snyder, originally for the US Puzzle Grand Prix that Dr. Sudoku authored. The frame in the grid leads to a fun logical solving path in a medium-difficulty puzzle.

Here are our best Loop/Path puzzles of 2017, a style which was featured in 30 posts in 2017.

Puzzlemaster Murat Can Tonta brought us our first top loop puzzle, a Yajlin, with a fun logical solving path.

Guest contributor Walker Anderson picked up his third “best of…” award with this easy and elegant Slitherlink.

The best “Loop” puzzle of 2017 pulled out a lot of the stops, as a super-sized combination of four different styles. Those solvers who were able to find their way to the final solution of this 4-Way Loop by Serkan Yürekli surely felt rewarded for the experience.

Here are our best Shading puzzles of 2017, our most frequent category with 60 posts this past year so we’ve selected five total “Best of…” winners here.

Leading off our winners is this classic Tapa by Murat Can Tonta with a Four Squares theme.

Murat brought another highly rated puzzle with this classic LITS with a patterned center.

However, our top three puzzles (all very close in votes) were minor variations on shading styles. Thomas Snyder brought us this Tapa (Different) puzzle that uses 15 different 2×2 blocks in different parts of the solve.

Tying for the best shading puzzle of 2017 is another Tapa variation, Visionary, from Tapa creator Serkan Yürekli that makes you look beyond the normal box to make progress.

The other puzzle tied for Best Shading Puzzle was a challenging Nurikabe by John Bulten where instead of the usual 2×2 rule in a lot of our shading puzzles, there was a no five in a line rule.

Here are our best Number Placement puzzles of 2017 (excluding Sudoku which is treated as its own category). We posted 22 Number Placement puzzles on the web throughout the year.

Two of our best puzzles in 2017, including this Kakuro (Touchy) by Grant Fikes, were exclusive for our patrons. If you want to see all of our puzzles, please subscribe to our site and you’ll get these bonus puzzles and other rewards.

Another Kakuro, this one from guest contributor Walker Anderson, got incredible reviews.

The top-rated Number Placement puzzle of 2017 came from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku, with this TomTom puzzle called Half and Half.

Here are our best Region Division puzzles of 2017, selected from the 42 web posts in this category (our second most frequent class of puzzle).

One of our theme weeks in 2017 was “Just One” with lots of puzzles using just the clue number 1. This Pentominous puzzle from Carl Worth was a very creative use of the just one rule, featuring the Roman numeral I, and was voted one of our best puzzles.

Another of the top puzzles was this Fillomino variation by Murat Can Tonta that required symmetric regions.

Our best Region Division puzzle of 2017 came from a guest constructor who is now a regular US puzzle team member: Walker Anderson (link to his blog). Walker cracks the “best of” listings a few times this year for his contributions, and this Cave puzzle had a really incredible logical flow.

Dear fans of GMPuzzles,

We’ve completed setting up 2018 subscription options for our supporters. You can find full details on this web page including quarterly and annual payment options at three levels. Payments will be through PayPal (no account needed if doing credit card processing).

The Expert level gives you early access to all of our puzzles as well as printed solutions and some solving videos to help you get better at our various styles.

The Master level includes the Expert rewards and adds in two extra puzzles for every posted week of puzzles and gives you your choice of one e-book published each quarter.

The Grandmaster level is the easiest way to get every single puzzle we publish in a year. It includes every e-book we publish (which you’ll receive before anyone else), two giant puzzle rewards, and everything in the other levels.

If you want to support our website in 2018, please consider becoming a subscriber to GMPuzzles.

Cheers,
Thomas

This week we’re going to feature our “Best of 2017” with the top puzzles as selected by you through the FAVE button. From Monday through Saturday we’ll be highlighting roughly three puzzles per category (region division, number placement, loop, …). We’ll also be releasing details on new subscription options for our fans, replacing the patronage model we’ve used in the past.

While this is a time for a lot of annual retrospectives, this past month also marked the 5 year anniversary of GMPuzzles. My initial business plan went out on 12/12/12 at 12:12:12 and our first post here was at the end of 2012 before New Year’s Eve. For those that have been solving from the start, and for those who joined later, thanks for supporting our puzzlemakers and our community by being a patron of the site, purchasing our books, or referring friends and family to our puzzles.

I’m incredibly proud that we’ve published about 2500 puzzles in these five years, including some phenomenal classics and cool variations, and have had 0 broken puzzles (with anything other than exactly 1 solution) despite being a hand-crafted puzzle company. I stopped keeping track of how often solvers have doubted us, but I think we are at least 100-0 when someone posts that one of our puzzles has a mistake. (We have had a couple typos in our blog posts and I’ll take the blame on the rare times when the answer entry was wrong but our puzzles have never been.)

Thinking back over five years, I judge that we have been very successful in highlighting great logic puzzle design and encouraging new designers to get into puzzle construction. However, we still have more to do to build a larger audience of solvers that appreciates hand-crafted logic puzzles. Some of our efforts this year will be to have more introductory titles/weeks. In our first year, we often had focus on single classic puzzle types in posted weeks and we will get back to that a little more during this year as well as trying to have more “easy” puzzles more regularly. A longer-term project is to reorganize our website. While we have a large backlog of puzzles in each style, it is hard for a person just discovering our blog to know where/how to start. We’re thinking through some user experience improvements for new solvers reaching the site and welcome any ideas you have.

In 2018, we are also going to work on scaling our publishing. I spent a lot of 2017 turning semi-automated processes into fully automated processes, including how we generate our puzzle art and our web posts. We just finished submission guidelines for all of our puzzles and contributors will receive these soon. I’m also very happy to announce that Serkan Yürekli will be joining me as an editor for our books and other puzzles which will add to our throughput.

We have several new books in mind for 2018, including the launch of a recurring sudoku publication with a mix of Classics and Variations which will be a great title for fans of sudoku, and several more e-books highlighting genres that haven’t been in books yet like Pentominous, Nanro, and Statue Park.

On a different note, we’re going to launch a “Puzzlemasters’ Workshop” title to highlight entirely new puzzles and variations. We get a lot of unusual variations submitted here, and they are hard to post on the web as one-offs. The goal of this title is to give authors enough space to develop an idea across several puzzles. The first edition, expected around midyear, will have a new style from each of our puzzlemasters and a few guests, with 6-10 puzzles in each new style. If this works, we’ll continue this series and open it up for other submissions as a way to continue to cultivate new puzzle design even while our web puzzles start to have a greater focus on “classics”.

Thanks for solving with GMPuzzles, and here’s to a great 2018,
Thomas