All the puzzles from last week have been grouped in this PDF.
Earlier this month the comedy Ghostbusters celebrated its 30th anniversary. This coming week on GMPuzzles will focus on a puzzle style whose name is based on a famous line from that film, with puzzles by Grant Fikes and Murat Can Tonta. The bonus puzzle for our high-level supporters will also be from that style. Do you know what puzzle we’re talking about?
All the puzzles from last week have been grouped in this PDF.
We have now launched our e-book store. This is a secured, PayPal-based ordering system and right now contains the first 4 (of 5) parts of “The Art of Puzzles”. You can get an individual part of The Art of Puzzles for $4, or the entire collection for $16. If you start by buying individual parts, the cost to complete the collection will continue to decrease (-> $12 -> $8 -> $4) so you can choose to try a few before you buy them all. If you have a solving account for the website already, that should work as your log-in to get to the secure store page. Once you purchase an e-book you will be able to download it anytime in the future by logging in to this account. As this is a new feature for us, if you run into any problems please email us using the link at the bottom of the page. We’ll be announcing more titles and a release schedule soon.
Puzzle-wise, this week highlights two things: an author and a championship. We’ll be posting six puzzles from Bram de Laat, a talented puzzle solver and author from the Netherlands. His puzzles are “extras” from the Indian Puzzle Championship as Bram made two puzzles of each type to allow the organizers some choice. The “extras” are actually some of the better puzzles, but also harder which probably motivated the competition choice. So be prepared for a harder week than usual. We will also have some bonus posts which highlight other Indian Puzzle Championship puzzles from GMPuzzle authors.
The exact schedule is this (highlight to view):
Monday (AM): Battleships by Bram de Laat
Monday (PM): Star Battle variation by Prasanna Seshadri
Tuesday (AM): Slitherlink by Bram de Laat
Tuesday (PM): Cross the Streams by Grant Fikes
Wednesday (AM): Slitherlink (Toroidal) by Bram de Laat
Wednesday (PM): Pentominous by Prasanna Seshadri
Thursday (AM): Araf by Bram de Laat
Thursday (PM): Word Nurikabe by Thomas Snyder
Friday (AM): Araf (Different Neighbors) by Bram de Laat
Friday (PM): TomTom by Grant Fikes
Saturday (AM): Battleships (Observers) by Bram de Laat
Saturday (PM): TomTom (Cipher) by Thomas Snyder
The bonus puzzle for our high-level supporters will be a Star Battle by Thomas Snyder.
All the puzzles from last week have been grouped in this PDF.
Soon we will be making some updates to the site including finally adding an e-book store. When we launch (tentatively this Friday), 4 e-books comprising 80% of “The Art of Puzzles” collection will be available. Within the month we expect to add the last part of “The Art of Puzzles” and also an electronic form of “The Art of Sudoku”. You can get an individual part of The Art of Puzzles for $4, or the entire collection for $16. If you start by buying individual parts, the cost to complete the collection will continue to decrease (-> $12 -> $8 -> $4) so you can choose to try a few before you buy them all.
In coming months, we will release e-books and sometimes print books for titles with LITS, Caves, and an easier puzzle collection from Grant Fikes that will be a good introduction to several of our puzzle styles.
This coming week is another variety week (highlight to view):
Monday: Slitherlink by Grant Fikes
Tuesday: Skyscrapers by Grant Fikes
Wednesday: Statue Park by Murat Can Tonta
Thursday: Cave by Prasanna Seshadri
Friday: Tapa (Transparent) by Prasanna Seshadri
Saturday: Thermo-Sudoku by Thomas Snyder
The bonus puzzle for our high-level supporters will be a Tapa (Transparent) by Prasanna Seshadri.
All the puzzles from last week have been grouped in this PDF. While Gemini continues, this marks the official end of our twin “Twin Weeks”. I hope you enjoyed the ~24 puzzles over the last couple weeks. I say ~24 as even I’m not sure I’ve found them all.
Next week will debut a slightly new format idea which is the split author week. I’ve let both Prasanna and Serkan focus on a single puzzle type and develop it over three puzzles. Prasanna will take the first three days with Tapa-Like Loop and Serkan will take the last three days with Light and Shadow, a new variant for this site.
The bonus puzzle for our high-level supporters is a Skyscrapers by Grant Fikes.
All the puzzles from last week have been grouped in this PDF. There were a lot of puzzles last week, so even if you think you’ve solved them all it might be worth taking another look.
This week marks Grant Fikes’ birthday, and we will have an unusual mix for the week with puzzles from Grant, Prasanna Seshadri, and guest contributor Bobby Liu. The theme will be quite obvious from the start this week at least. The bonus puzzle for our high-level supporters is a Fillomino by Grant Fikes.
All the puzzles from last week have been grouped in this PDF.
This coming week is another variety week (highlight to view):
Monday: Nurikabe by Prasanna Seshadri
Tuesday: Masyu by Grant Fikes
Wednesday: Tapa-Like Loop by Prasanna Seshadri
Thursday: LITS by Craig Kasper
Friday: Fillomino by Thomas Snyder
Saturday: Statue Park by Prasanna Seshadri
The bonus puzzle for our high-level supporters will be a Fillomino (Cipher) by Grant Fikes.
We’ll have a little more discussion in the comments here later after the dust settles about the puzzles, but we hope everyone enjoyed today’s US Puzzle Championship.
Our puzzlemasters contributed several puzzles to the competition including:
Crosslink by Grant Fikes
Double Minesweeper by Serkan Yürekli
Nurikabe Path by Thomas Snyder
Star Search by Thomas Snyder
Tapa by Serkan Yürekli
Tapa View by Prasanna Seshadri
Wind Shield by Serkan Yürekli
Wordmark by Serkan Yürekli
All the puzzles from last week’s Araf collection have been grouped in this PDF. It seemed to have been well received as a genre so we may choose to feature it more regularly in our rotation. I personally enjoy it a bit more than other intuitive styles like Numberlink, but that could just be a result of it feeling “new” having only solved about twenty Araf puzzles.
This coming week has a mini-theme to it, perhaps “something old, something new”, as half the puzzles will be from guest contributors who have made some interesting puzzles. The rest are from Grant Fikes, who is not so much “old” as familiar. He’s been contributing about a puzzle a day since the start of the year; there will be a collection of the Foxger’s puzzles coming later this year as a book/e-book from GMPuzzles which will be a great book for solvers just learning how to solve some of these types.
The exact schedule for the week is this (highlight to view):
Monday: Star Battle by Grant Fikes
Tuesday: Skyscrapers by Grant Fikes
Wednesday: Fillomino by Walker Anderson
Thursday: Yajilin by Grant Fikes
Friday: Place by Product by Ravi Kumar Macherla
Saturday: Tapa by Murat Can Tonta
The bonus puzzle for our high-level supporters will be a Masyu by Prasanna Seshadri.
All the puzzles from last week’s variety week have been grouped in this PDF. Over the last couple of weeks we’ve also been highlighting some championship puzzles written by puzzlemaster Serkan Yürekli. If you’d like to see his entire 24HPC puzzle set, go here. The Japan dakejanai Zukei dakejanai Puzzle Championship puzzles we featured have not been released yet, but may eventually be here.
Serkan has been an instrumental designer in sharing good ideas from Japan with a wider, western audience; his OAPC series, WPC puzzles, and even his contributions here at Grandmaster Puzzles (like last week’s Dominion originally by Naoki Inaba) are often styles adapted from puzzles he finds in Japanese championships. Next week will focus on another such type, originally a Japanese style 相ダ部屋 that was renamed Araf, meaning “purgatory” in Turkish, by Serkan when I first ran into it at the 2010 World Puzzle Championship. We will have some classic puzzles, and some interesting minor variations.
The bonus puzzle for our high-level supporters will be a Cross the Streams by Grant Fikes. Our Master and above patrons also received a puzzle we believe to be the largest Tapa ever made (it is certainly the largest Tapa Serkan Yürekli has ever written). If you haven’t considered supporting our website yet, now would be a good time to do so.
All the puzzles from last week’s Skyscrapers collection have been grouped in this PDF. Many thanks again to Roland Voigt for the fantastic Skyscrapers; he even made some walkthroughs for the classic puzzles. You’ll find more of Roland’s puzzles here and other content linked from his blog.
Next week will be another variety week with a range of puzzles including a few new variations (highlight to view):
Monday: Battleships by Thomas Snyder
Tuesday: Slitherlink (Sheep and Wolves) by Grant Fikes
Wednesday: TomTom by Grant Fikes
Thursday: Dominion by Serkan Yürekli
Friday: Thermo-Skyscraper Sudoku by Hans van Stippent
Saturday: Heavy Dots by Prasanna Seshadri
The bonus puzzle for our high-level supporters will be a Fillomino by Prasanna Seshadri.
We will also have a few bonus puzzles throughout the week from the recent competition puzzles from Serkan Yürekli. This week they will all be Double Minesweeper puzzles which is a style we plan to feature in a future title from Grandmaster Puzzles.