You can find our most recent week featuring Star Battle in this PDF.

After three straight weeks of puzzles, we are taking one week off (we will continue this 3:1 schedule for 2018). We’ll be back next week with a variety mix from our puzzlemasters.

Our Grandmaster subscribers are still getting puzzles today, receiving a Giant 20×36 Nurikabe puzzle by Murat Can Tonta and the “Plenty of Pentominous” e-book by Grant Fikes and Murat Can Tonta. We’ll be releasing this book on the website in a few weeks, but the easiest way to get all our puzzles is to sign up for a subscription.

You can find our most recent week featuring Slitherlink in this PDF.

This coming week features an object placement puzzle style: Star Battle, with five classic puzzles and one variation.

This week, Master+ subscribers to the site are also getting two bonus puzzles: an easy Star Battle by John Bulten and a hard Star Battle by Serkan Yürekli, as well as puzzle solutions. If you want to become a subscriber and get access to bonus puzzles, solutions, e-books, and other rewards, check out this page.

You can find our first week of puzzles for 2018, a hard variety mix by guest Joseph Howard, in this PDF.

This year we will more regularly post weeks that focus on one puzzle style (with 4-5 classic puzzles and 1-2 variations of the style) with a complete range of very easy to hard puzzles. For our next week the focus will be on Slitherlink.

This week, Master+ subscribers to the site are also getting two bonus puzzles: an easy Slitherlink by Grant Fikes and a hard Crosslink by John Bulten, as well as puzzle solutions. If you want to become a subscriber and get access to bonus puzzles, solutions, e-books, and other rewards, check out this page.

You can find our “Best of 2017” puzzles gathered in this packet.

This year we are going to be cycling between one variety week and then two focused weeks. We kick off our 2018 schedule tomorrow with a (hard) variety week of puzzles from guest author Joseph Howard. The puzzles start out around “Wednesday” level and go up from there.

Our next two weeks (starting 1/22 and 1/29) will feature a single Loop genre and then a single Object Placement genre and there will be a more complete range of very easy to hard puzzles.

This week, Master+ subscribers to the site are also getting two bonus puzzles: a Statue Park by Murat Can Tonta and a Roller Coaster by Joseph Howard, as well as puzzle solutions and a video talkthrough of the Saturday puzzle. If you want to become a subscriber and get access to bonus puzzles, solutions, e-books, and other rewards, check out this page.

Here are the two best Sudoku puzzles of 2017, as well as our best “Extra” puzzles. We only had 13 Sudoku posted this past year but will have many more in 2018.

One of our patrons requested this unique combination of Arrow, Shape, and Thermo-Sudoku by Prasanna Seshadri, and it was a fantastic puzzle.

The highest-rated Sudoku for 2017 was this challenging Killer Sudoku by Serkan Yürekli.

In addition to our usual puzzles, we sometimes had larger combinations, hidden puzzles, or puzzle hunt style puzzles. Both of the below “extras” got top marks from our fans.

Prasanna returned for his usual “Birthday Surprise” on March 2nd with this combination of Yajisan-Kazusan and Tapa.

Our other best Extra puzzle was “Border Patrol” by Thomas Snyder, a puzzle hunt puzzle without any instructions.

With that, we’re done with the Best of 2017, and you can find all of the puzzles in this PDF.

Here are our best Object Placement puzzles of 2017, selected from the 17 posts over the year. While this style did not feature as often as others in 2017, it includes our runaway vote winner for Puzzle of the Year.

One of the best object placement puzzles of this year was a gem that only our patrons got to see. Murat Can Tonta, practicing the art of Statue Park, made a memorable antisymmetric puzzle. If you want to see all our web puzzles, subscribe to GMPuzzles.

This Battleships by Thomas Snyder was not necessarily meant to have a long shelf life — it was constructed for one specific day — but our solvers enjoyed it and gave it several FAVEs to make the top list.

The best Object Placement puzzle of the year, and also the overall Best Puzzle of the year, goes to this Star Battle by Thomas Snyder, originally for the US Puzzle Grand Prix that Dr. Sudoku authored. The frame in the grid leads to a fun logical solving path in a medium-difficulty puzzle.

Here are our best Loop/Path puzzles of 2017, a style which was featured in 30 posts in 2017.

Puzzlemaster Murat Can Tonta brought us our first top loop puzzle, a Yajlin, with a fun logical solving path.

Guest contributor Walker Anderson picked up his third “best of…” award with this easy and elegant Slitherlink.

The best “Loop” puzzle of 2017 pulled out a lot of the stops, as a super-sized combination of four different styles. Those solvers who were able to find their way to the final solution of this 4-Way Loop by Serkan Yürekli surely felt rewarded for the experience.

Here are our best Shading puzzles of 2017, our most frequent category with 60 posts this past year so we’ve selected five total “Best of…” winners here.

Leading off our winners is this classic Tapa by Murat Can Tonta with a Four Squares theme.

Murat brought another highly rated puzzle with this classic LITS with a patterned center.

However, our top three puzzles (all very close in votes) were minor variations on shading styles. Thomas Snyder brought us this Tapa (Different) puzzle that uses 15 different 2×2 blocks in different parts of the solve.

Tying for the best shading puzzle of 2017 is another Tapa variation, Visionary, from Tapa creator Serkan Yürekli that makes you look beyond the normal box to make progress.

The other puzzle tied for Best Shading Puzzle was a challenging Nurikabe by John Bulten where instead of the usual 2×2 rule in a lot of our shading puzzles, there was a no five in a line rule.

Here are our best Number Placement puzzles of 2017 (excluding Sudoku which is treated as its own category). We posted 22 Number Placement puzzles on the web throughout the year.

Two of our best puzzles in 2017, including this Kakuro (Touchy) by Grant Fikes, were exclusive for our patrons. If you want to see all of our puzzles, please subscribe to our site and you’ll get these bonus puzzles and other rewards.

Another Kakuro, this one from guest contributor Walker Anderson, got incredible reviews.

The top-rated Number Placement puzzle of 2017 came from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku, with this TomTom puzzle called Half and Half.

Here are our best Region Division puzzles of 2017, selected from the 42 web posts in this category (our second most frequent class of puzzle).

One of our theme weeks in 2017 was “Just One” with lots of puzzles using just the clue number 1. This Pentominous puzzle from Carl Worth was a very creative use of the just one rule, featuring the Roman numeral I, and was voted one of our best puzzles.

Another of the top puzzles was this Fillomino variation by Murat Can Tonta that required symmetric regions.

Our best Region Division puzzle of 2017 came from a guest constructor who is now a regular US puzzle team member: Walker Anderson (link to his blog). Walker cracks the “best of” listings a few times this year for his contributions, and this Cave puzzle had a really incredible logical flow.