This past week of Kakuro puzzles is collected in this PDF and the solutions are in this PDF. If you enjoyed this genre, check out these e-books with additional Kakuro puzzles.

The daily solution videos are on the posts and linked below.

This upcoming week will feature a collection of Loop Variety puzzles from Ashish Kumar and Murat Can Tonta, specifically five styles that will be featured in the ebook Loop Variety Collection from the same authors being released next week. We hope you enjoy these different styles.

This past week’s set of Statue Park puzzles are collected in this PDF and the solutions are in this PDF. We have another Sunday Surprise coming out in a few minutes which will be a very hard Statue Park variation by JinHoo Ahn. If you enjoyed this genre, there are more Statue Park puzzles in this ebook by Murat Can Tonta.

The daily solution videos are on the posts and linked below.

This upcoming week will feature Kakuro puzzles.

This past week’s set of Pentominous puzzles are collected in this PDF and the solutions are in this PDF. If you enjoyed this genre, there are many more Pentominous puzzles in our “Plenty o’ Pentominous” series as well as in the book Intro to GMPuzzles.

The daily solution videos are on the posts and also linked below. I was playing with a few different notation styles (lines, shading, letters, …) through the week on Penpa, and admit this is one of the puzzles where multiple defaults (and even multiple solution checking options) may be best. Please share your comments on how you prefer to solve Pentominous puzzles and if you could make this work in Penpa. We will probably document all of these methods when we formalize the user experience for this style and for Fillomino.

This upcoming week will feature Statue Park puzzles and will also include a large variation as a Sunday Stumper.

Finally, there are still some minor debugging and optimization steps happening with the fave/solve tracker after the most recent update, including trying to lengthen the time the login is stored. Please keep sharing your comments on how this is working and if all of the solving history has come over from the transfer to the site.

We are excited to announce that The Art of Sudoku 2 is now released in our e-store. This collection of 180 hand-crafted sudoku and variations from sixteen authors was many years in the making, but certainly worth the wait. The entire collection is available for $10 in our e-store, and there are three $4 subsections available: A) = 60 Classic Sudoku; B) = 20 Tight Fit / 20 Consecutive Pairs / 20 Even-Odd Sudoku; C) = 20 Thermo-Sudoku / 20 Arrow Sudoku / 20 Other Variations.

We have been continuing to make some updates to the website. First, on the Penpa side, all of the “classic sudoku” in our archives now have an online solving option. This is the second puzzle, after Kurotto, to be fully digitized, and Star Battle is being worked on now. When we are through with digitizing more styles, we will be reintroducing them here including making some How To videos for using Penpa for these genres.

Also, our solve tracker on each puzzle post has been updated to now be hosted on our site. This update should fix the login problems people have reported over the last six+ months; please tell us if you run into any issues with it, including not seeing your past fave/solve history.

This past week’s set of Sudoku puzzles are collected in this PDF and the solutions are in this PDF.

The daily solution videos are on the posts and also linked below.

This upcoming week will feature Pentominous puzzles.

Note that our solving widget/fave button is being fixed over this week and may temporarily be inaccessible; hopefully after the update is complete the issue that was keeping some people from logging in will be resolved. We will share more info when we know all functionality is working again.

This past week’s set of Tapa puzzles are collected in this PDF and the solutions are in this PDF.

The daily solution videos are on the posts and also linked below. We’ve been getting some helpful feedback on what you like about these videos as well as things we can be doing differently; please feel free to share your own comments as we continue to make these. We will eventually be making tutorial videos for how to use Penpa-Edit for each style, but as the interfaces are still being improved we have not done this for any genre yet.

This upcoming week will feature Sudoku puzzles and variations. We also expect to be releasing The Art of Sudoku 2 next Sunday. This long-awaited book features 180 hand-crafted sudoku puzzles, including 60 classic Sudoku, 20 Tight Fit Sudoku, 20 Consecutive Pairs Sudoku, 20 Even/Odd Sudoku, 20 Thermo-Sudoku, 20 Arrow Sudoku, and a variety section with 20 other Sudoku of different styles. We’ll be selling it as a complete collection or as three partial packs split out by sections (Classic only; Tight Fit + Consecutive + Even/Odd; Thermo- + Arrow + Other).

We have now added the solution to the Linking 200 Cells puzzle to the website (and if anyone was looking for “hints” as opposed to solutions, we will now be able to add those into the comments on the website). There were 33 correct submissions out of about 40 entries. The three randomly selected winners, who have each won an e-book from Prasanna Seshadri, are Yossi Fendel, Tom Luo, and Arthur Nebout. Congratulations to these three, and we hope you all enjoyed the puzzle!

Today is the last day to submit an answer to Prasanna’s 200th puzzle submission contest. We’ll be back with a contest summary and list of winners later in the week (no later than Sunday the 21st).

Today we will also have a new Sunday Stumper (Anti-Pi Sudoku by Serkan Yürekli) as another bonus puzzle which will post in a few minutes.

The past Variety puzzle week of Even Rows and Columns puzzles are collected in this PDF and the solutions are in this PDF.

We’re starting to try releasing the solving videos the day after the puzzle posts, and will continue that this week although the blog entry may not get updated as routinely. So please subscribe to our Youtube channel if you want to always see the latest solution video. For the week, here are the six solving videos:

This upcoming week will feature Tapa puzzles and variations.

There is still another week to submit answers to Prasanna’s 200th puzzle submission contest. That challenging puzzle as well as the 30th Birthday Surprise would have filled the week on their own, but we also had six great TomTom puzzles for you. The TomTom puzzles are collected in this PDF and the solutions are in this PDF.

I have made solving videos in Penpa-Edit for all of the TomToms from this week so check these out if you got stuck or want to learn more ways to think about these puzzles:

This upcoming week features a variety mix of puzzles, all with the same new constraint of “Even Rows and Columns”. We hope that you enjoy it. Also watch out on 3/14 for our next Sunday Stumper.

Throughout 2021, we are working to have our older catalog of puzzles updated to have digital solving options and to also have solution PDFs everywhere.

On the PDF front, we have recently added another 18 months of solutions to the site and currently have answers for all puzzles posted going backwards to February 2016.

We are also now taking individual puzzle types and putting them all into Penpa-Edit to enable digital solving. The first puzzle style we have completed is Kurotto and all 27 of our prior Kurotto have digital versions with automatic solution checking online. We will eventually “reintroduce” these puzzles with a better set of “How To” videos, a curation of our favorites, and a better web-flow than just blog pages for solvers who want to binge on one of our styles. For now, if you want to try more of this shading puzzle style please click through the Kurotto archives.

Finally, a lot of people have been asking about our solving widget (i.e., FAVE/SOLVE button) that has had login issues for several months due to browser security updates as it was hosted externally. We are nearing completion of an update to host this ourselves, and will share another update here at the end of the month. With the solving tracking, online solving, and other solutions coming together we hope that the solving experience for GMPuzzles in 2021 is greatly improved. Please share your feedback with us on how we can do even better.

Prasanna is celebrating two milestones this week and we will have two special large puzzles. The first one here recognizes Prasanna’s 200th submission on GMPuzzles, and combines three of the styles where Prasanna has written books for our e-store.

(view directly for a larger image)

PDF

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools; while solution checking is not enabled, if you are comfortable with the different tool selection options you should be able to fully solve the puzzle in this mode too.)

Theme: Linking 200 cells

Author/Opus: This is the 200th puzzle from our contributing puzzlemaster Prasanna Seshadri.

Rules:

Grids 1-2: Follow regular LITS rules. Between the two LITS grids, the corresponding white cells can never both be shaded, while the corresponding gray cells must be identical in the three 200-shaped regions.

Use the LITS solutions and your ingenuity to discover the needed constraints for Grids 3-4. For Grid 3, you will find that some gray circles must change color to white or black.

Grid 3: Follow regular Balance Loop rules. Additionally, the loop must cross itself if it passes through a gray circle. The loop must go straight throught the gray circle both times; in one direction the path behaves as if the circle is white with equal loop lengths, and in the other direction the path behaves as if the circle is black with unequal loop lengths. It is not required that the loop pass through all of the gray circles (but it must pass through all white and black circles). (See also the image below.)

Grid 4: Follow regular Yajilin rules.

When taken together, the grids yield a short final answer! Send this (less than five character) string to hiddencontest at gmpuzzles dot com by March 14th, 2021 to be eligible to win an e-book by Prasanna Seshadri. The contest is now closed and results summarized here.

Difficulty: 5 stars?

Solution: PDF