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.

I haven’t been able to share more details with you on my mental health recently (not mental illness, although the first being in bad shape can lead to the other!). I wanted to give you all this update, possibly more to come later, as you all watch out for the site and for me.

Over my life, I have managed what I have called hypomanic states that can include (short) bursts of high productivity, creativity, the need to do extensive walking or running to control one’s thoughts, and diminished sleep. This past week, starting ~March 13th and provoked primarily from stresses at my scientific work, was the first time I had a full on manic episode that built over 3-4 days, including the release of an unusual amount of ideas in raw/vocal and short/tweeted form from usually dormant accounts. Over March 17th-20th, for reasons I won’t share here although they don’t involve self hurt/harm or trying to hurt/harm others, I was confined to a psychiatric ward in San Mateo for 72 hours of evaluation. I received both individual and group therapy, and have started to get better but am not yet well. Today, I was released from that facility and have my best friend watching out for me as I get resettled in my San Bruno home. I have an on-going treatment plan including on-going outpatient group/individual therapy and medications that I will be managing.

Most of the above is considered my protected health information, but I am openly sharing it because the discussion of mental health is very poor in the United States and possibly across the world. I’m not interested in hiding what I just went through, but learning more about it and making sure it doesn’t happen again to me and by proxy to others struggling with the borderline of hypomanic and manic states.

Over the coming weeks I will mostly be recuperating, and helping GMPuzzles a bit will be part of my recovery. This business is not profitable yet, but I view it as a big contribution back towards mental health given the numerous other authors and puzzle solvers who find comfort in the logic we put into the world each day. A community of both authors and solvers who may be on the autism spectrum or have dealt with depression, suicidal thoughts, or other challenging things, but been appropriately cautious to share them externally. I’m hopeful that in the coming weeks the visibility of my mental break will help us update how we all try to communicate together, by talking to people rather than talking at people, at least until we understand where they may be coming from.

I will probably be moving all of this discussion forward in other channels like my LinkedIn and not in our puzzle feed so you do not need to engage further if you do not want to.

Thanks for all your thoughts and support through the years but particularly these last few days,
Thomas (aka Dr. Sudoku)

Edited to add: Also see these videos: video 1 and video 2 for a little more commentary about where my head is at.

Edited again to add: Here is a self-contained video analyzing the week of the breakdown, some aspects of how I track my mental health, and more.

Today we’ve released the latest editions in our Masterpiece Sudoku Mix series. Both collections (Tight Fit Sudoku and Consecutive Pairs Sudoku) contain 25 sudoku that are masterpieces of visual and logical style, written by some of the best puzzle designers in the world. If you purchase these books together (or any two mix books with discount code MASTERPIECE), you’ll receive a 10% discount at checkout.

Note: We have not set up a digital solving option for these books yet (we have only started this for the Starter Packs but later in this year should come back). We will likely prioritize certain genres over certain book series when adding digital solving to our existing books, and some types like Tight Fit Sudoku are still in the worse part of interface support in my view.

We’ve just published the first volume of a new series of “Starter Packs”, books with good easy to medium (Monday to Wednesday) puzzles for some of our different puzzle genres. The first volume, Starter Pack 1: Fillomino features one of our favorite region division puzzles and comes with 30 hand-crafted puzzles by Grant Fikes.

This is also the first e-book from us that includes a set of links to Penpa-Edit versions of the puzzles for online solving. While we are still working to create a more immersive online solving experience in the future, people who buy this book will find a set of 30 web-links at the back to be able to digitally solve all of the puzzles too.

The next Starter Pack will be coming out in a couple months and will feature Tapa by Serkan Yürekli.

I wanted to start some of our 2022 updates for the year by sharing this draft schedule for our books, with most detail set for the first six months of the year. We are continuing our Grandmaster Puzzles Quarterly and Masterpiece Sudoku Mix series that we launched in 2021, and also starting a new, accessible puzzle series of “Starter Packs” for people to get into some of our different logic styles. In the same style as the Intro to GMPuzzles books, these Starter Packs will contain ~30 puzzles for ~$1.50 and all puzzles are from 1-2.5 stars in approximate difficulty. Eventually, as we release these books, we will also rebuild the web flow for these styles so that there is a way besides the “blog” to learn about the puzzles, how to use Penpa, and so on.

Book list:
1. Shading Variety Collection by Prasanna Seshadri (January)
2. Starter Pack 1: Fillomino by Grant Fikes (February)
3. Masterpiece Sudoku Mixes 5 and 6 (Tight Fit Sudoku and Consecutive Pairs Sudoku) (early March)
4. Grandmaster Puzzles Quarterly 3 featuring Thermo-Sudoku, Skyscrapers, Battleships, Cross the Streams, Kuromasu, Balance Loop (late March)
5. Starter Pack 2: Tapa by Serkan Yürekli (April)
6. Slitherlink and Variations 2 (April)
7. Tapa and Variations 3 (May)
8. Starter Pack 3: TomTom by Thomas Snyder (June)
9. Grandmaster Puzzles Quarterly 4 featuring Even/Odd Sudoku, Japanese Sums, Minesweeper, Nurikabe, Pentominous, Castle Wall (late June)
10. Masterpiece Sudoku Mixes 7 and 8 (July)
11. Starter Pack 4: Slitherlink by Takeya Saikachi (late July/early August)
12. Loop Variety Collection 2 (August)
13. Grandmaster Puzzles Quarterly 5 (September)
14. TBD title (October)
15. Starter Pack 5: Star Battle by JinHoo Ahn (October)
16. TBD title (November)
17. Starter Pack 6: Jigsaw Sudoku by Thomas Snyder (December)
18. Grandmaster Puzzles Quarterly 6 (December)

The eighteen book schedule is ambitious but lets us diversify the kinds of titles and different puzzles we are publishing while also taking up new goals like getting Penpa/digital solving forms of these by sometime this year.

Not on the “official” list, but part of projects I am working on separately, are releases containing our old patron puzzles including our “Giant” puzzles, starting a Giants annual book, and rereleasing some of my older books of sudoku variants and TomTom puzzles. There is also a very different but interesting puzzle collection book that has been stuck in editing that we hope to get out.

Paired with this schedule, we have also started to look at how easily we can set up a “subscription” in our book store to automatically release these titles to people who want to have all books in a given series like GPQ or who want all books that we publish.

As promised, I’ve now finished making a video describing all the steps that went on before, during, and after constructing my milestone 400th post. For those looking for something different on our YouTube channel, check out the video there.

PS: I make a “promise” in the video that if we get to 1,000 YouTube subscribers this year, I’ll make a new milestone puzzle around that idea. Do with this info what you will.

PPS: We are continuing to explore different kinds of YouTube content this year, so feel free to comment on more things you’d be interested in seeing besides daily solution videos.

We’ve just published our next e-book, the Shading Variety Collection by Prasanna Seshadri. In this book, the five shading puzzle styles Canal View, Nurimeizu, Heyawake, Aqre, and Yajisan Kazusan receive the Grandmaster Puzzles treatment with elegant, hand-crafted puzzles by Prasanna. There are a total of 54 puzzles, with 10 or 11 in each of the styles; you’ll surely get a workout in shading cells as you learn how to advance from the easy beginning grids to the very hard and large concluding puzzles.

This upcoming week of puzzles will feature original puzzles (not from the book) across these five puzzle styles.

We’re starting the year with even more updates to improve Penpa-Edit (and a mid-week update because of our excitement for them).

First, outside of the tools themselves, we’ve finished digitizing and adding links to all the Tapa puzzles on the site. We are now about 70% done with digitizing the full backlog of puzzles, and will be handling Masyu next. Thanks to Murat, Prasanna, and Grant who have been working with me on this project for the last several months. The current list of genres with complete backlog support is listed on our Penpa-Edit notes page.

Second, as suggested in this last post (Penpa-Edit updates), we’re starting to add more answer checking and solver support tools to different puzzle types. In that post, we asked for interested people to start to contribute to Penpa and improve the site. I’m excited to say that kieranclancy has joined the effort and already contributed initial tools for Star Battle and TomTom checking that we just uploaded this morning. The Star Battle tools check for row/region and adjacent touching aspects and highlights them for the solver if breaking the rules. The TomTom tools check for Latin Square constraints and in many puzzles for valid cage mathematical sets. In collaboration with swaroopg92, they’ve also added options to turn on/off the answer checking as we expect some solvers in competition mode may not want to be given these automatic reminders. This is available from the Settings menu under “Conflict Detection” which can be turned on or off (for a single puzzle or all puzzles).

Note that these updates are still in beta mode, and there are probably a few puzzles where they may not work or cause issues. So please tell us if you run into unexpected behavior.