[Update: As of 2021, we are now routinely using penpa-edit and more info is here.]

While I am mainly a pencil-and-paper puzzle solver, I always thought GMPuzzles would eventually find some digital outlets. Not necessarily one outlet — our different styles have different needs and a good app for Sudoku/TomTom is probably quite different from a good app for Tapa/Nurikabe — but at least some outlets where we would be content providers. While I will soon have some of my TomTom puzzles as part of one app-based release, this is the exception and not the rule after 7.5 years.

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Here are our best Object Placement puzzles of 2019, selected from the 38 web posts in this category based on your FAVE votes:

Our first favorite puzzle was a bonus for our subscribers, a Star Battle from Murat Can Tonta with four interacting T’s framing the grid. (We are beginning to organize all of our web bonus puzzles into a new book so that those who missed these puzzles from 2014-2019 can see what they missed.)

Our next favorite puzzle came from Ashish Kumar, the most recent puzzlemaster to join the team. It combined Minesweeper and Battleship logic and required some outside of the box thinking.

For some reason I don’t fully understand, pi-themed puzzles are always popular on the site. Serkan Yürekli brought out a Digital Battleships puzzle that used the first 100 digits of pi and a nice series of outside clues to limit the grid.

Our top two puzzles both used the theme of “two” in different creative ways. Guest contributor Bryce Herdt made this challenging Pentopia puzzle with only two-way straight arrows as clues.

Leading to our best object placement puzzle of 2019, this quite unusual and very logically interesting Battleships puzzle by John Bulten.

All of these best Object Placement puzzles are collected in this PDF file.

A reminder that throughout June, as part of our reopening, we have a special 20% discount on all titles in the shop (automatically applied at checkout) so please check out the store if you want to purchase some puzzle PDFs.

Our most recent week of Star Battle puzzles can be found in this PDF and the solutions are all grouped in this PDF and have also been linked to the individual posts.

We have three video solution talkthroughs for this week. As I was the constructor for the Saturday puzzle, you can find my exact intended path in this video:

and you can also find my approaches to solving the Wednesday and Friday puzzles in these videos

Over this weekend, we have also completed the first part of a long-term project to add solutions to our web backlog. All puzzles from 2018 and 2019 now have posted PDFs of the solutions, and you can also grab their solutions from our weekly PDFs page.

Later today we will be back with our second “Best of 2019” post highlighting Object Placement puzzles, and also a post discussing thoughts on online solving tools for GMPuzzles. And this upcoming week we will focus on Pentominous puzzles.

Here are our best Sudoku puzzles of 2019, selected from the 31 web posts in this category:

Our first favorite puzzle was a very nicely themed Killer Sudoku by Serkan Yürekli with a rocket theme and a visual countdown in the grid.

Guest contributor Chris Green put together a paired set of Tight Fit Sudoku with a really interesting challenge that stretched the way you tend to think about this style.

Our next two top Sudoku are both clueless varieties. First, from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku, is this clueless Arrow Sudoku.

Ashish Kumar made a clueless Thermo-Sudoku in preparation for the World Puzzle Championship that was also one of our top puzzles.

But the overall best sudoku of 2019 goes to an unusual puzzle which was a Birthday Surprise Sudoku from Prasanna Seshadri that was a nearly perfect puzzle for his 28th birthday.

All of these best Sudoku puzzles are collected in this PDF file.

Our most recent week of Sudoku puzzles can be found in this PDF and the solutions are all grouped in this PDF and have also been linked to the individual posts.

This week’s video solution talkthrough is for Grant Fikes’s Killer Sudoku puzzle (and I approached it as more of a blind solve tutorial as a change of pace as I hadn’t done the puzzle in awhile.)

We have also been highlight favorite old puzzles where we have available solution videos. Serkan Yürekli made this hard Killer Sudoku which we posted almost 6 years ago. If you haven’t tried it yet, please do; if you get stuck, here are some tips:

Later today we will be back with our first “Best of 2019” post highlighting Sudoku.

This coming week we will be featuring Star Battle puzzles.

A reminder that this June, as part of our reopening, we have a special 20% discount on all titles in the shop (automatically applied at checkout) so please check out the store if you want to purchase some puzzle PDFs.

Our first 2020 week of puzzles can be found in this PDF and the solutions are all grouped in this PDF and have been linked to the individual posts.

This week’s video talkthrough is for Elyot Grant’s interesting Fillomino puzzle.

Next week we will be featuring Sudoku puzzles including some variations.

It is great to be back, which means we met our goals of relaunching our e-book store alongside our weekly web puzzles. For the whole month of June, we have a 20% discount on all titles in the shop (automatically applied at checkout) so please check out the store if you want to purchase some puzzle PDFs.

There are more updates to come later in the year as we strive to improve the GMPuzzles community experience. One of those areas to is expand our Sunday content, including a return of our “Ask Dr. Sudoku” column. One topic we will plan to discuss soon is related to a comment from this week’s Star Battle puzzle — how should we integrate electronic solving options to our web posts and books. If you have other questions or suggested topics for us, please share as comments and we’ll select some for future posts.

We also are overdue to post our “Best Puzzles of 2019”, and we will start that next Sunday with our Best Sudoku of 2019. But as an early preview, and as the extra solution video for this week, we wanted to link to one of our very best (and trickiest) puzzles of 2019, this Fillomino from John Bulten from January 2019. In case you missed it, please try it now; tips if you get stuck are in the solution video below.

Sunday is going to be a day when we feature solution videos to our puzzles. Today we’re pleased to have a video for this morning’s Consecutive Pairs Sudoku from Cracking the Cryptic / Simon Anthony.

Also, we have just relaunched a new version of our e-store for our puzzle PDF books, which should be much easier to use with more payment options, cart functionality, search functionality for authors and genres, notifications when PDFs are updated, …. Note that the old accounts / passwords will not work here but we can share prior purchases with you if you need to grab the downloads again.

We’re still doing some visual improvements as many of our books never had covers or online examples. We will likely highlight one old title each week with sample puzzles while we update the catalog.

For the whole month of June, we will have a 20% discount on all titles in the shop (automatically applied at checkout). So this is a great time to catch up on any past collections from GMPuzzles that you may have missed. And please tell us if you run into any issues with the new store.

Dear solvers,

We just added the Plenty o’ Pentominous 2 ebook from Grant Fikes and Murat Can Tonta to our web store. These two fantastic authors have constructed 53 more creative Pentominous puzzles including some new highly original themes. So if you enjoyed their first Pentominous collection (or even, on the other extreme, if you’ve never solved a Pentominous before) you may want to check out this new book.

While I don’t have another update on when GMPuzzles will begin posting web puzzles again, that is in part because of a different, non-puzzle update from me. After almost five years at Verily Life Sciences (formerly Google), most recently as the Head of Computational Biology, I just left that job. I will be returning to Adaptive Biotechnologies as VP/science lead for their immunosequencing diagnostics program in early March. I’ll be splitting time in Seattle and San Francisco for this new role, and it will be the main focus of my time for the next several years. (I’m still hopeful that if I can successfully hand off most GMPuzzles responsibilities to others in the coming months, this should not have too large an effect on this site going forward; thanks again for your patience as I work through this life transition.)

I’m sharing here a message I sent to subscribers by email this weekend, which contains a lot of the emerging vision I have for 2020 and beyond. We’ll be back soon (but with no fixed date in 2020 for this return yet), but I’m excited for what is coming.

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TL;DR: I’m writing to share an update with what should be good news as we will be back sometime in 2020, but with some immediate changes including the end to all subscriptions in their current form.

Dear subscribers,

As mentioned a few months ago, my full-time work in science and my goals for bigger things for GMPuzzles made it unsustainable to continue to do regular web puzzle posting, e-book publication, as well as routine subscriber reward fulfillment. It was not an easy decision to “pause” the site, but the words of encouragement from you — our loyal fans — have helped over November in clarifying our best approach to 2020 and beyond.

A couple common themes that you shared with me were that:

• Many of you subscribed in part to just give back to a site that you loved (that you’d donate if you could and that I shouldn’t bother to send a refund*).
  • *I am still going to send you a refund for any 2020+ prepayments by end of year, as that is what any business should do in this situation.
• The solving videos really helped you better understand the puzzles, author motivations, and tips to solve them. They were one of your favorite rewards.

Across these themes and others was a pretty clear signal that we have the right content (elegant hand-crafted puzzles from our group of authors) but the wrong approach at the moment for this content, particularly the wrong early monetization. The Patreon/subscriber reward type model was a first experiment but one that it is time to end. It makes it harder to do our job each week. A lot of the interactions because of the small scale have not been automated, like adding/subtracting names from the email list. Rewards that need me to reach out 2 or 3 times for a book choice (and I still am bothered when 15% have an unclaimed reward even after many messages). So when subscriptions after a couple years do not bring in too much revenue (and I don’t need the revenue at the moment to keep the site running for many years), I should return to focusing on the core strengths. One of my biggest regrets in going to the subscription model is that it greatly reduced the commenting on the GMPuzzles blog. We never had a technical solution to let you comment early when receiving the puzzles early, so the discussion from those who would print a puzzle out after 9 AM to do that day died away. I think it is important to have “events” to build a community like first releases to everyone at the same time, as well as other time-scale releases (products/books) that aren’t meant to be absorbed in the same way.

Building the puzzle community is the most important thing we should be doing right now. Our solving videos on Youtube are another important channel we’ve not tried to make the main channel. That is where I want to start an active web channel for me and other puzzlemasters who solve our GMPuzzles posts (and possibly outside puzzles like Puzzle Grand Prix puzzles) to discuss the beauty of puzzles as a means to *grow* a community, including a competitive puzzle community. Putting all the videos *behind* the paywall is a mistake I need to undo. I am going to unhide the whole channel very soon. I’ve already shared the full backlog of videos with you a couple weeks ago. I’m sharing it with the world, and going forward it is not a “reward” to learn how to solve a puzzle. It is a route into our community for people of any skill level.

So in 2020 (but not in January), we’re going to return to a predictable web posting schedule. We will add solutions in PDF form to each puzzle after a few days so that we can cut down on the only comments we still routinely get on the site that need moderation — people doubting we have a valid or unique puzzle solution (and we’ve never made an error *yet*). And we’ll probably completely remove the puzzle submission tracker but not the rating/fave system as it takes us extra work to define submissions, add arrows to our otherwise automatically generated art, and triple check we don’t have typos there (where again we have many checks on the puzzles but not the submissions). Keeping the good pieces and making them easier to get to you, with a focus on growing the audience, is the core theme for 2020. And I have a very good candidate (you may be able to guess who) for our Managing Editor position who will come on in January to ensure we have this predictability in all things GMPuzzles when we “unpause”.

As a business, we will still try to generate some revenue, by publishing and selling e-books. Once we get a routine schedule for these books to be published, including regular series we are launching like Grandmaster Puzzles Quarterly, we may turn on subscriptions again to let you receive some of our books at a discount. But we will have a far better technical solution for how to get you that content so that it can actually scale.

For seven years since launching the site, I’ve considered myself the main patron of GMPuzzles. I have put both time and money into seeing the puzzles I like to solve come about more. I’ve appreciated having other patrons take off some of this burden (financially), but the burden in time was actually larger than expected in doing so. So I’m improving the patronage goal by simplifying too. We will add a tip jar to the site. And we will let you choose whether you want to donate to GMPuzzles, to a puzzle author, or to both at some ratio. GMPuzzles is stronger than just me, and you should have a way as we grow the community of puzzle authors alongside the community of puzzle solvers to encourage their art.

While this is a long message, I want to close the mail with a simple message of thanks. For as much as you’ve thanked me for our puzzles, I am as appreciative of the thoughtful comments, patience, and dedication you’ve shown me and the site over the years. I would not find the energy to continue to try to make GMPuzzles a larger thing if not for all of you!

Cheers,
Thomas

Dear solvers,

We just added a Yajilin ebook from Murat Can Tonta and Prasanna Seshadri to our web store. This is a really great collection of 50 loop puzzles that we shared with subscribers this Spring but had not posted to the store yet. For those looking for more GMPuzzles challenges during our web hiatus, check out this book and our other collections in the store.

Besides posting this book, I have not been doing any puzzle solving or editing over the last month due to a lot of science work (another of the many projects my team plays a role in was just announced publicly). So it might be too optimistic to think that web-posting will restart in early 2020. But I am moving forward with the planning of responsibilities for a first hire for the company, and have some interesting new project ideas coming together that could form new outlets for our puzzles.