People looking for new puzzles from me should check out next weekend’s Puzzle Grand Prix. Many USPC contributors (and therefore many GMPuzzles contributors) have written puzzles. I’ve made LITS and Shape Minesweeper sections; Serkan Yürekli has made some Kakuro; Roger Barkan (author of the Colossal Cave Collection) has made some Caves.

There are still no solvers of the Hidden Contest.

I continue working through my transition; while I’ve been at my new job for a month, I only just found my permanent residence in CA for this year and will move in next weekend. Still a lot to do before I see the time returning to do much with GMPuzzles.

We’ve extended the hidden contest for at least two more weeks and added another hint for it.

Besides this hidden contest, there will likely be no new puzzles on the site until May, and a return to a regular schedule will probably still be some time after that. I’ll be using some of this time to close out lots of things that have been pushed back because of the demands of meeting a weekly posting schedule, including the print edition of The Art of Puzzles, the print and electronic editions of The Art of Puzzles 2: Double Trouble, as well as the #1 Fans puzzle promised to our patrons long ago. Thanks again for your patience.

I wanted to share some life/site news with you all. Tomorrow I’m starting a new job at Google with their Life Sciences team. I just drove back to California for this unique opportunity, but I am quite far from being settled in.

As a result of this life change, I’m going to be taking an indefinite break from posting regular puzzles here. There may be a few random puzzles posted during this gap, but this past week was the last full week for awhile.

In the interim, there is still an open contest to solve (with a new hint).

And for most of you, there are still hundreds of past puzzles to look through. I’ve made a new archive page where you can readily download everything we’ve posted.

— Dr. S.

The advertised “stats” update for 2014 will be coming later, but I did want to follow up on several requests from readers for the new year.

– I’ve already posted about our site navigation changes for 2015 but I wanted to mention again the new sidebar/”posts by category” and “posts by author” bits and make sure solvers are finding this to be an improvement.

– We received many requests for a way to distinguish the PDF files in a week as they sometimes get mixed after printing; we’re now adding the posting date to the top of all PDFs in 2015 which should help track things better.

– The biggest open ticket to address is a way to track the puzzles you’ve solved. Here I have to rely on our web developer at the moment so I can’t promise you any timeline, but I hear the request loud and clear. We’ll work through the challenges of merging the solving data with a representative calendar of our site posts and have something available as soon as possible.

– We’ll be adding some new puzzlemasters this year, but I won’t tell you who or when yet. That will be a surprise.

– Also on the horizon for early this year are some improvements to our estore, including more titles there (that only our patrons have seen), and a new header for the blog.

Now that we are doing so many things with daily puzzles and monthly ebooks and other collections, it is time to bring on some more freelancers to help with the site and with our books. There are projects that simply cannot move fast enough because I don’t have the time to complete them myself. Our most pressing need is for an artist that can create covers for our book collections. We’re looking for clean, professional art that showcases how special our puzzles are, with our The Art of Sudoku cover being a prime example. If you think you might be the person to help us with that, please contact us.

During these “gap” weeks I like to make updates to the website and WordPress. This morning you’ll notice a real change to the navigation on the sidebar which categorizes our many posts into puzzle genres. This should be much easier to use to find some of the less common puzzles. For instance, Grant’s Ripple Effect that was highlighted as a “Best Of …” yesterday before could only be found by searching deep in the Puzzle or Variation categories. Now it is cleanly with a handful of others in “Other Number Placement”.

There is also now a set of hard links to the different puzzle authors, which makes a hidden feature a lot more obvious.

This update did change our blog’s style.css sheet so you may need to do a hard refresh of the page for everything to display as intended.

Please come back later today for the first in our “Best of 2014” entries. Our supercomputers (read: Thomas, working with a spreadsheet and some graphs) are crunching the numbers as we speak to bring you this exciting summary of the last year at Grandmaster Puzzles.

While the last week of posts covered the best of 2013 and some things to look forward to in 2014, I wanted to make a separate post about funding the site going forward.

To this point, our website has been free; but you must recognize that most of the puzzlemakers here have been blogging for years with very little reward for their work besides your thanks in comments. I set one year after launch as a point to have a discussion on when and if things should change from “free” to something else. I’ve dismissed for now adding either advertisements (unlikely to make much money) or registration costs (unlikely to let us continue to grow users) as a means of getting support for our puzzle writing. However, I’ve strongly considered going to a patronage system where people who want to support us have an easy outlet to do so. This is sometimes a “Tip Jar” on websites, but I don’t know that that is as effective as it could be. I’ve been interested in trying out new systems to directly reward devoted fans and also tap into social networks a bit more; to this end, we now have a Patreon page for people who want to contribute funds for our puzzlemaking.

The general idea of Patreon is to support creative people in a world where fewer and fewer content providers want to pay for quality work. Instead of supporting one big project, like Kickstarter and Indiegogo do, the goal at Patreon is to get patrons to support an artist as he/she continues to put out work. In our case, every time we deliver a month of puzzles, we would get some support from each of our patrons. This would help us reimburse our authors and pay for our website to keep running.

To encourage patronage, we have also set up some rewards. These include early access to puzzles, solution images, puzzle walkthroughs (one of our most unique features that we want to start doing regularly again), and even bonus puzzles or custom puzzles from our puzzlemasters. This bonus content will only be available to our supporters. When I spoke about monthly “Puzzle Packs” in the last post, I should have mentioned that the easiest way to get everything we do at Grandmaster Puzzles in 2014 is going to be to support us at Patreon at the Grandmaster level. Consider it a subscription to all the content we ever release as every PDF book we put out in a given month will go to supporters at that level during that month. Patreon recently added PayPal support, which should make it much more accessible for some of our solvers to consider funding us.

We realize this is a new idea — for us and for you — but we’d like you to consider what you get out of Grandmaster Puzzles and if you’d be willing to help it keep growing. We’re not putting up any paywall or ads; we’ll still have an (almost) daily puzzle here for awhile for anyone who wants to browse our site. But we can be bigger and better with your help. So please check us out over at Patreon.

-Thomas, writing for all of the contributors to GMPuzzles

While all of the last posts had easily defined categories, we did have a few puzzles this past year that went well outside of the box. We wanted to give them some recognition as our Best of 2013 comes to a close.

First, our reward for “Best Puzzle Response” has to go to Craig Kasper for one of his Sunday Surprises. After Grant Fikes posted a Doctor Who-themed “Seek and Spell Sudoku”, Craig put together a quite appropriate and humorous retort from the Daleks. It was certainly one of our more memorable jokes of the year.

“Best Repeat” has to go to Grant’s LITS + Double Back puzzle from July. While it scored ok in each category, that it actually worked as two kinds of puzzle made it something we didn’t mind posting twice. We’ll try to double back on Double Back puzzles later this year.

Finally, “Best Surprise” was clearly won by Dr. Sudoku’s April 1st Word Search puzzle. If you haven’t tried it yet, you really should without any spoilers so we won’t say anything more except our readers thought it was awesome.

2013 was an incredible year for us. Many years ago Wei-Hwa Huang and I came up with a dream to build a daily puzzle site. While we never had the time to get it off the ground then, Grandmaster Puzzles is now a clear destination site for logic puzzle fans around the world. We currently have five regular authors and one more on the way starting tomorrow. In 2014 we hope to have a few more guest authors appear here and there. There will also be a few format changes to make the site more accessible to newcomers, which you’ll notice in the coming weeks. One of the larger ones is that we will have a return to having some focused weeks where a particular puzzle type will be highlighted.

One big change in 2014 is that we will plan to put out regular PDF “Puzzle Packs” for sale every month. Our long awaited “The Art of Puzzles” will actually be released first as five separate puzzle packs currently planned to start at the end of this month, with a Tapa and Nurikabe collection, and then two more in February, and the last two in March. The complete set will then be published as a print-on-demand book for solvers who’d prefer a hard copy. After that we have a few different sudoku and other puzzle packs in the works — some from individual authors and others from a mix of contributors. I don’t know if I can meet my New Year’s Resolution of getting one out each month in 2014, but with more help on the site now we should be able to get close.

I’ll close this post with some solving stats from the first year. We posted 322 puzzles and actually had several solvers complete them all (or come very close). At 99+% completion when we last checked were lukabear, achan1058, muhorka, kiwijam, Projectyl, sknight, sworls, JooMY, and FoxFireX, while migross76, uvo, Alien, and sfcorgi were quite close. These are clearly our top fans for the year! Once we have a nice prize to raffle off we will give something out to at least one of these frequent solvers. We had 30 solvers register solutions to at least 200 puzzles and in total had over 15,000 correct answers this year. (Many visitors just download the puzzles and don’t track their answers on the webpage, but to make our leaderboard you’ll need to submit.)

Our most solved puzzle is surprisingly our very first prescription, Dr. Sudoku Prescribes #1, which had the benefit of lots of direct links in January and has slowly been gaining finishers throughout the year. With so many puzzles now, a lot of solvers have certainly put some of these on their “backlog”. In terms of web traffic, we outgrew our first server set-up by the midyear, but have been stable and on-line consistently since then after a change of hosts/servers. I hope we continue steady growth in 2014 without needing to again rebuild things.

Most important to me, we had 0 broken puzzles for the whole year; every single one had just one solution. Some of the credit for this goes to our authors who are diligent about their submissions, but some thanks must also go to our many test-solvers for double- and triple-checking. There are a few computer-generated puzzle makers that write things like “our automatic process guarantees no broken puzzles” as if this is some unique benefit of their process. Proper development, editing, and testing can be done with more elegant hand-crafted puzzles too. While we might eventually make an error once in a blue moon, our solvers should consider our puzzles quite reliable.

As always, we appreciate your input on what you’d like to see here, and we thank you for your readership over the year.

Congratulations to our contributing puzzlemaster Palmer Mebane for his dominant performance throughout the general competition at the recent World Puzzle Championship. Over the coming weeks we will post several of the puzzles Palmer wrote before the WPC as practice here, which should show you the dedication a puzzle champion must have to his craft.

As we get back into a regular schedule, you can find the set of puzzles we posted over the last two weeks gathered in this PDF. Here are the puzzles you can expect from Monday to Saturday this week (highlight to view):
Monday – Yajilin by Grant Fikes
Tuesday – Fillomino by Grant Fikes
Wednesday – Sudoku Variation by Thomas Snyder
Thursday – Star Battle by Thomas Snyder
Friday – Cross the Streams by Grant Fikes
Saturday – Smashed Sums Variation by Palmer Mebane

Now that the WPC is over, our focus is back on finishing our large book project “The Art of Puzzles”. This has taken awhile to put together as it has grown to be an over 250 puzzle title, with at least 25 puzzles in 10 different styles (Tapa, Nurikabe, Masyu, Slitherlink, TomTom, Skyscrapers, Fillomino, Cave, Star Battle, and Battleships). We have almost two dozen authors represented from around the world, including all of our contributing puzzlemasters to varying degrees. Grant Fikes deserves particular credit for the high quantity and quality of the puzzles he has provided (about 20%, basically tied with Dr. Sudoku) including many very large grids. One special treat is that the Tapa section was written entirely by Serkan Yürekli, the originator of the style and a true Tapa Master. You’ll definitely appreciate some of the surprises he packed into his puzzles. Some of the last tasks to do on the book now are to gather and write a really good set of hint/tutorial sections for the puzzles which may go into the book or may just end up online as an extra supplement. We are also looking through different printing and binding options and expect to offer both print and electronic forms of the book on release. Look for more announcements on “The Art of Puzzles” here soon.

If you are seeing this, you’re now connecting to gmpuzzles.com via our new webserver. Over the last month or so it became clear we had outgrown our original shared hosting service so we hope our new hosting is more stable and also faster for you. We’ve also changed some of our associated plug-ins to further improve site performance and memory usage. It is possible that some of these changes may affect some of our associated APIs like the Solve Button in unexpected ways, so please comment on any errors or irregularities you encounter over the next week in case there is something we’ve missed in our transition process.

ETA: It actually seems some readers are crawling both old and new servers still. The Friday Bonus Skyscrapers puzzle will not be viewable if it is trying to find that file on the old server, so in that case you have to view the page directly if RSS is wrong, refresh the page or clear your browser cache, or wait a few days for this to update on its own.

Thanks for your patience — and happy solving!