Sunday Update and Solutions: Happy 10th anniversary
Tomorrow marks an important anniversary for Grandmaster Puzzles. On 12/12/12 at 12:12:12 PM (PT) I emailed out my first business plan/organizing documents to the original group of GMPuzzles team members. A few weeks later marked the first blog posts on the site, as well as a new journey in my life as I’d just made a hard decision to leave a science role/project I’d been working on for several years and relocated to Seattle, aiming to rediscover my goals in life starting with Grandmaster Puzzles.
A lot has changed in the time since. For GMPuzzles, this includes a much larger group of contributing puzzlemasters and other authors, Serkan becoming my partner in GMPuzzles as managing editor, regular YouTube solving videos, and digital solving options via Penpa-Edit for all new web posts and some of our books. Professionally and personally, I’ve also gone through a lot from (f)unemployment for a year in 2013 to growing responsibilities as a scientist and team leader, moving back to the San Francisco Bay Area, all while still supporting GMPuzzles through time and money.
Throughout these years though nothing has changed in our mission to bring you “hand-crafted logic puzzles, by the best puzzle designers, for all who love puzzles”. We’ve posted over 2,600 free web puzzles, released over 55 books/collections including several thousand more original puzzles, and never published a “broken” puzzle with an error in the puzzle art, even if I’ve caused a fair share of typos on our posts through the years.
A lot of thoughts come to mind thinking back through this GMPuzzles journey to date, and we’ll be writing more as we hit the end of the year about what are plans are for 2023 and beyond. We expect to make some changes (doing more of some things, less of others) as we update our business plan and explore other new paths to get revenue by supporting other puzzle projects and competitions. For now, let me share my thanks with everyone on the GMPuzzles team, everyone who has ever submitted a puzzle, and you the audience for solving our puzzles and adding your comments to the website. This community of puzzlers has been great to see come together, to support each other including me through some tough times. I’m excited for what comes next.
If you’ve enjoyed our web content, please continue to support the site by sharing gmpuzzles with your friends, by buying some of our books or by making a donation using the button in the menu to the left to give back to our puzzle authors.
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Zooming back to the regular content, our most recent week of puzzles to highlight the “Starter Pack” series is collected together in this PDF and the solutions are in this PDF. You can find all of our Starter Pack books in our e-store, and the 6th volume of “Jigsaw Sudoku” will be released in 2023.
The daily puzzle “talkthrough” videos are on the posts and linked below.
Like this most recent week, our last two weeks of the year will focus on upcoming books starting with the “Loop Variety Collection 2” where we will have some less common loop styles this week including some from the genres in that collection. We’ll also have an unusual Sunday Stumper in one week. Our last week of blog puzzles will then focus on styles from Grandmaster Puzzles Quarterly Volume 6 as we close out ten years of puzzles.