After a tough January with assorted things like a power outage impacting our ability to compete on the United States Puzzle Championship, and many more events around my science work leading to a mental health break, we’re back on track for most of our 2023 projects. For Grandmaster Puzzles, we’ve now completed our recent “Best Of” series is now finished and we just released our third edition of “Smashing the Sudoku” to go along with our original 60+1 puzzle set.

Coming in the future will be some invites to puzzle contributors and top fans for our Discord channel where we are brainstorming what is next for the site (in 2023 and out to 2033 in a ten year plan), a new approach to web content, and more info on puzzle championships that GMPuzzles will be involved in.

(Copying a message below after a day where I’ve felt better than any time in the last 5 years having made a hard life decision. If I haven’t seen you in awhile or written in awhile, this is my commitment this year to share the love with my closest network, to detoxify myself and then to reconnect with my 1000 strongest connections to then see what we can do together on the problems we don’t even know to identify yet. The spark came from thinking about my move to 2014, the story of me ending my (f)unemployment from puzzles and relearning my love of science. It was a letter to Chad. I’ll not share his response unless he agrees, but I want you to know what I’m saying to my close network of people. Writing letters as with a postage stamp may not be a scalable thing to do, but I don’t care right now as it is a great way to share clear thoughts.)

Dear Chad,

There are not enough words (certainly not these 500+) that can say how much I appreciated your love last year, hearing your family connection to mental health while going through a challenging 2022 myself.

You might have seen Verily’s reduction in workforce news. Wednesday was a tough day for me after an exhausting JPM week. I drove to my college alma mater today and cleared my head and feel quite different. It’s added up to the decision in the header, I am taking a sabbatical from full-time work in 2023. I want to slow down parts of my life so that I can speed up my thinking. I want to help change the world, to coach the teams that might be able to.

My first innovative decision is to try life without a cell phone for this year, and connect back with the people I love. I may write a scientific paper after 12 months about the experience on my mental health and on others — I have lots of good measures and I am a data scientist so there could be a story there. Having gone through DBT therapy and being observant has made me recognize even just watching the homeless and mentally ill, or trying to talk to them and seeing how often I can get through — those observations from a person like me could make a difference. I think my main research goal might become tackling mental illness, but January is just about reading non-science books and trying other things.

So to keep me accountable — that this is a sabbatical and not a retirement — I commit this year, every couple months, to write you some thoughtful notes, with no rush for you to respond back (consider it a long letter sent with a postage stamp). I will be visiting different places sometime and I would love to get a set-up like a $1 and 0 equity advisor role just so I can have a badge back if I find myself in Seattle and want a place to sit and do some thinking and don’t need to send any emails to have an open door and a hotel desk. I don’t have an admin, I don’t want an admin. I want an open door like I loved having when I was at google so I could see a foreign city and get a quick snack before heading to an airport if needed. When it is a longer stay, we should certainly arrange an invited talk, a chance for lunch or other connection with you and Harlan.

I have strong connections in 10+ cities, but yours is the only one I want to start with for Seattle, because just talking about immunosequencing with some of its pioneers may revive what I felt in 2014, a time I consider one of the most stimulating in my life as I had access to all your data and to Tableau and could just play. I want my 1-2 day experiments to be things I can share anywhere, and we’ll discuss how this might be possible later. My message today was to just say I made a decision for me and am off the market but also not working anywhere deliberately. I’m going to celebrate my 43rd birthday next Thursday by being with my best friend, their partner, and child, in Boston who I haven’t seen enough since they moved away from SF during my post-hospitalization therapy.

I know we’re not genetically related, but I consider you a dear part of my family — I only use the term for closest connections and mentors/mentees in both directions. I do hope that you are managing these tough times. No rush to respond, but I look forward to a pleasant surprise in my inbox within the next 12 months. And I’ll stand by my commitment to write when I want to share a connection and fun life experience and maybe a new idea where something is connecting in a bigger picture I want to form.

With love,
Thomas

(I was intending to start some more 2023 planning thoughts here today including a bonus sudoku, but I haven’t had power at my home due to recent weather since last night. For now, enjoy the first Smashing the Sudoku I released yesterday on YouTube.)

(Update Jan 9, 2023 morning: I did get power restored last night, but effectively lost a lot of momentum on this project while I worked on others. So we’ll start again next weekend, life permitting; stay well!)

A ten-year update to our first puzzle post ever.

Solve our logo puzzle online by clicking here or download this PDF to solve offline (go back to the original post for solution tracking).

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A few stats for our past decade of puzzles:

Longer form thoughts follow, including some introspection:
(more…)

While we are still closing out 2022 here on the west coast of the US, we wanted to wish a Happy New Year to those already in 2023 and those who soon will be.

We’re closing out the year on a great note with the release of our Grandmaster Puzzles Quarterly Volume 6, with 60 puzzles across Sudoku, Kakuro, Parking Lot, Nanro, Snake Pit, and Round Trip styles. This is our 17th collection published in a busy 2022, and you can see all the books listed by release date here or can search for favorite puzzle types in our e-store directly.

Tomorrow marks an important anniversary for Grandmaster Puzzles. On 12/12/12 at 12:12:12 PM (PT) I emailed out my first business plan/organizing documents to the original group of GMPuzzles team members. A few weeks later marked the first blog posts on the site, as well as a new journey in my life as I’d just made a hard decision to leave a science role/project I’d been working on for several years and relocated to Seattle, aiming to rediscover my goals in life starting with Grandmaster Puzzles.

A lot has changed in the time since. For GMPuzzles, this includes a much larger group of contributing puzzlemasters and other authors, Serkan becoming my partner in GMPuzzles as managing editor, regular YouTube solving videos, and digital solving options via Penpa-Edit for all new web posts and some of our books. Professionally and personally, I’ve also gone through a lot from (f)unemployment for a year in 2013 to growing responsibilities as a scientist and team leader, moving back to the San Francisco Bay Area, all while still supporting GMPuzzles through time and money.

Throughout these years though nothing has changed in our mission to bring you “hand-crafted logic puzzles, by the best puzzle designers, for all who love puzzles”. We’ve posted over 2,600 free web puzzles, released over 55 books/collections including several thousand more original puzzles, and never published a “broken” puzzle with an error in the puzzle art, even if I’ve caused a fair share of typos on our posts through the years.

A lot of thoughts come to mind thinking back through this GMPuzzles journey to date, and we’ll be writing more as we hit the end of the year about what are plans are for 2023 and beyond. We expect to make some changes (doing more of some things, less of others) as we update our business plan and explore other new paths to get revenue by supporting other puzzle projects and competitions. For now, let me share my thanks with everyone on the GMPuzzles team, everyone who has ever submitted a puzzle, and you the audience for solving our puzzles and adding your comments to the website. This community of puzzlers has been great to see come together, to support each other including me through some tough times. I’m excited for what comes next.

If you’ve enjoyed our web content, please continue to support the site by sharing gmpuzzles with your friends, by buying some of our books or by making a donation using the button in the menu to the left to give back to our puzzle authors.

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Zooming back to the regular content, our most recent week of puzzles to highlight the “Starter Pack” series is collected together in this PDF and the solutions are in this PDF. You can find all of our Starter Pack books in our e-store, and the 6th volume of “Jigsaw Sudoku” will be released in 2023.

The daily puzzle “talkthrough” videos are on the posts and linked below.

Like this most recent week, our last two weeks of the year will focus on upcoming books starting with the “Loop Variety Collection 2” where we will have some less common loop styles this week including some from the genres in that collection. We’ll also have an unusual Sunday Stumper in one week. Our last week of blog puzzles will then focus on styles from Grandmaster Puzzles Quarterly Volume 6 as we close out ten years of puzzles.

We’re excited to announce the publication of the third volume of our “Starter Pack” series, Starter Pack 3: TomTom. Like the rest of our Starter Packs, this collection contains a set of easy to medium (Monday to Wednesday) puzzles perfect for solvers wanting to learn a new style or for experienced solvers who want familiar, but not impossible, challenges.

This is a particularly exciting collection for me as it is my first time coming back to make a TomTom collection in many years. While the cover art features my famous first calcudoku from 3/3/09, the book itself contains 36 original puzzles, 18 with operations and 18 without operations. There are also a set of links to Penpa-Edit versions for online solving with answer/error checking enabled.

The next Starter Packs will feature Slitherlink and Star Battle, and we welcome your continued feedback on this series.

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)

Hi all,

I wanted to share some updates and other thoughts about our solving videos.

1) We have historically released the videos one day after the puzzles are released and still think this is the most rewarding approach so the earliest solvers can’t get help right away on a tough challenge. But we have been putting the updated links on the original posts the next day which make them hard to schedule and requires daily site maintenance. We will now instead be posting the solutions on the following day’s puzzle, but with quick links to those posts for people in the future to find.

2) Also, we are starting to get some other people making these solving videos and not just me. Yes, they will need some (helpful) feedback about microphones and clarity of words and pace of speech and other things, so please be constructive in your comments and not just complain. We’re all trying to share the language of puzzles and even if the words fail to be perfect in a video, the visual images should be enough to help guide you on where to look and potentially how to think to get to the next steps. That the language of a logic puzzle does not need any “English” is what excites me so much in communicating through puzzles.

3) Finally, if you are interested yourself to eventually become a presenter of solution videos for GMPuzzles, please feel free to reach out here. One great way to officially “apply” for this kind of job is to film a video for any of our puzzles that currently don’t have one. If they are good enough, we’ll add that video to our official post and channel and may consider adding you to the GMPuzzles team to do these videos more regularly. There are a lot of others using twitch or YouTube to make solution videos so the standards already out there, people using OBS or other streaming tools to make videos, is our starting point. Not where I was at in 2014 when I made the first video with just a cell phone camera and shaky video and bad lighting. I’ve enjoyed learning how to make more compelling videos without needing an editor and expect some of you might as well so I’m here to help.

Cheers,
Thomas

We just uploaded a new version of Penpa-Edit tools to the site. The major update with this version is the presence of solve histories which you can also share with others using the “share” button and then “Replay URL” choice. Here is an example link of me doing the Monday Kakuro puzzle. In Solve Path mode it will go through one entry step at a time and at uniform speed. In Live Replay mode, provided you had the clock on, it will show the exact timing of all entries and make the long thinking moments more obvious too. We’re still exploring this feature and don’t yet have an intention to have this replace our solving videos but think the ability to store and share your own solving paths will be neat.

There were also some minor fixes and other improvements that were part of this update. Please share any thought/feedback here as you begin to use the latest version of Penpa-Edit.