All the puzzles from last week have been grouped in this PDF.

This year we are alternating between “variety” weeks with lots of puzzle styles and “focused” weeks with one/two related puzzle styles that get developed from easy to hard over the course of the week. Next week will focus on the following puzzle type (highlight to view):

Cave (Classic and Product Variation)

If you enjoy our puzzles, please consider becoming a patron of GMPuzzles. See the top of the sidebar for more info.

Thanks to Prasanna Seshadri for a very entertaining debut week last week. All of his puzzles have been grouped in this PDF.

This year we will be alternating between “variety” weeks with lots of puzzle styles and “focused” weeks with one/two related puzzle styles that get developed from easy to hard over the course of the week. Next week will be a variety week with the following puzzles (highlight to view):

Monday – Sudoku by Grant Fikes
Tuesday – Fillomino by Grant Fikes
Wednesday – Slitherlink (Sheep and Wolves) by Thomas Snyder
Thursday – Battleships by Thomas Snyder
Friday – TomTom by Tom Collyer
Saturday – Tapa (Triomino) by Prasanna Seshadri

If you enjoy our puzzles, please consider becoming a patron of GMPuzzles. See the top of the sidebar for more info.

While the last week of posts covered the best of 2013 and some things to look forward to in 2014, I wanted to make a separate post about funding the site going forward.

To this point, our website has been free; but you must recognize that most of the puzzlemakers here have been blogging for years with very little reward for their work besides your thanks in comments. I set one year after launch as a point to have a discussion on when and if things should change from “free” to something else. I’ve dismissed for now adding either advertisements (unlikely to make much money) or registration costs (unlikely to let us continue to grow users) as a means of getting support for our puzzle writing. However, I’ve strongly considered going to a patronage system where people who want to support us have an easy outlet to do so. This is sometimes a “Tip Jar” on websites, but I don’t know that that is as effective as it could be. I’ve been interested in trying out new systems to directly reward devoted fans and also tap into social networks a bit more; to this end, we now have a Patreon page for people who want to contribute funds for our puzzlemaking.

The general idea of Patreon is to support creative people in a world where fewer and fewer content providers want to pay for quality work. Instead of supporting one big project, like Kickstarter and Indiegogo do, the goal at Patreon is to get patrons to support an artist as he/she continues to put out work. In our case, every time we deliver a month of puzzles, we would get some support from each of our patrons. This would help us reimburse our authors and pay for our website to keep running.

To encourage patronage, we have also set up some rewards. These include early access to puzzles, solution images, puzzle walkthroughs (one of our most unique features that we want to start doing regularly again), and even bonus puzzles or custom puzzles from our puzzlemasters. This bonus content will only be available to our supporters. When I spoke about monthly “Puzzle Packs” in the last post, I should have mentioned that the easiest way to get everything we do at Grandmaster Puzzles in 2014 is going to be to support us at Patreon at the Grandmaster level. Consider it a subscription to all the content we ever release as every PDF book we put out in a given month will go to supporters at that level during that month. Patreon recently added PayPal support, which should make it much more accessible for some of our solvers to consider funding us.

We realize this is a new idea — for us and for you — but we’d like you to consider what you get out of Grandmaster Puzzles and if you’d be willing to help it keep growing. We’re not putting up any paywall or ads; we’ll still have an (almost) daily puzzle here for awhile for anyone who wants to browse our site. But we can be bigger and better with your help. So please check us out over at Patreon.

-Thomas, writing for all of the contributors to GMPuzzles

While all of the last posts had easily defined categories, we did have a few puzzles this past year that went well outside of the box. We wanted to give them some recognition as our Best of 2013 comes to a close.

First, our reward for “Best Puzzle Response” has to go to Craig Kasper for one of his Sunday Surprises. After Grant Fikes posted a Doctor Who-themed “Seek and Spell Sudoku”, Craig put together a quite appropriate and humorous retort from the Daleks. It was certainly one of our more memorable jokes of the year.

“Best Repeat” has to go to Grant’s LITS + Double Back puzzle from July. While it scored ok in each category, that it actually worked as two kinds of puzzle made it something we didn’t mind posting twice. We’ll try to double back on Double Back puzzles later this year.

Finally, “Best Surprise” was clearly won by Dr. Sudoku’s April 1st Word Search puzzle. If you haven’t tried it yet, you really should without any spoilers so we won’t say anything more except our readers thought it was awesome.

2013 was an incredible year for us. Many years ago Wei-Hwa Huang and I came up with a dream to build a daily puzzle site. While we never had the time to get it off the ground then, Grandmaster Puzzles is now a clear destination site for logic puzzle fans around the world. We currently have five regular authors and one more on the way starting tomorrow. In 2014 we hope to have a few more guest authors appear here and there. There will also be a few format changes to make the site more accessible to newcomers, which you’ll notice in the coming weeks. One of the larger ones is that we will have a return to having some focused weeks where a particular puzzle type will be highlighted.

One big change in 2014 is that we will plan to put out regular PDF “Puzzle Packs” for sale every month. Our long awaited “The Art of Puzzles” will actually be released first as five separate puzzle packs currently planned to start at the end of this month, with a Tapa and Nurikabe collection, and then two more in February, and the last two in March. The complete set will then be published as a print-on-demand book for solvers who’d prefer a hard copy. After that we have a few different sudoku and other puzzle packs in the works — some from individual authors and others from a mix of contributors. I don’t know if I can meet my New Year’s Resolution of getting one out each month in 2014, but with more help on the site now we should be able to get close.

I’ll close this post with some solving stats from the first year. We posted 322 puzzles and actually had several solvers complete them all (or come very close). At 99+% completion when we last checked were lukabear, achan1058, muhorka, kiwijam, Projectyl, sknight, sworls, JooMY, and FoxFireX, while migross76, uvo, Alien, and sfcorgi were quite close. These are clearly our top fans for the year! Once we have a nice prize to raffle off we will give something out to at least one of these frequent solvers. We had 30 solvers register solutions to at least 200 puzzles and in total had over 15,000 correct answers this year. (Many visitors just download the puzzles and don’t track their answers on the webpage, but to make our leaderboard you’ll need to submit.)

Our most solved puzzle is surprisingly our very first prescription, Dr. Sudoku Prescribes #1, which had the benefit of lots of direct links in January and has slowly been gaining finishers throughout the year. With so many puzzles now, a lot of solvers have certainly put some of these on their “backlog”. In terms of web traffic, we outgrew our first server set-up by the midyear, but have been stable and on-line consistently since then after a change of hosts/servers. I hope we continue steady growth in 2014 without needing to again rebuild things.

Most important to me, we had 0 broken puzzles for the whole year; every single one had just one solution. Some of the credit for this goes to our authors who are diligent about their submissions, but some thanks must also go to our many test-solvers for double- and triple-checking. There are a few computer-generated puzzle makers that write things like “our automatic process guarantees no broken puzzles” as if this is some unique benefit of their process. Proper development, editing, and testing can be done with more elegant hand-crafted puzzles too. While we might eventually make an error once in a blue moon, our solvers should consider our puzzles quite reliable.

As always, we appreciate your input on what you’d like to see here, and we thank you for your readership over the year.

We started with two loop genres (Slitherlink and Masyu) and added our own take on another (Yajilin) later in the year. But some Snake, Path, and other puzzles came in as well. In this category, variations seemed to get high ratings most consistently, with a surprise favorite among the group.

All for One and One for All, one of our first Slitherlink puzzles with an uncommon center, was the early favorite in this category.

But two Slitherlink variations would end up tied with higher rankings at the end of the year. March brought us Slitherlink (Domino) from Grant Fikes, an entertaining puzzle that gave domino clues and required the loop to be tiled as dominoes (but not necessarily uniquely, which led to much debate).

While there were no wolves in sheep’s clothing in our next favorite, Slitherlink (Sheep/Wolves) from October was also well-received.

Among the Masyu, the most top votes went to Grant’s extra large format puzzle from June (Grant contributed two more large Masyu to The Art of Puzzles which we can’t wait to show you).

But the favorite in the category was a much more recent puzzle, Tapa-like Loop from Serkan Yürekli. Whether this variation has enough steam to become a regular puzzle type remains to be seen, but a lot of solvers enjoyed this one example so we will try to have some more in 2014.

These phenomenal loop puzzles are gathered together in this PDF.

Fillomino and Cave are the two major Region Division styles we have here at GMPuzzles, and 2013 saw 39 puzzles across this space. The favorites here span the calendar year.

Standard Fillominoes formed many of your most favorite puzzles. While it was one of the more recent puzzles, Grant’s 28-dice opus #8 received a good ratio of fave votes to solves.

In July, after Palmer debuted as a contributor here, his seventh puzzle with an Antisymmetric Ones theme received your votes.

And perhaps because of the challenge (our hard puzzles seem to be more favored than our easier ones), Squeeze Play from March also made the final cut.

These two cave puzzles slightly edged out Fillomino at the very top this year though. Almost Perfect 10? from our initial release of Cave puzzles got high marks.

But the Region Division Puzzle with the most votes was this Cave (Product) variation from early April. We’ll certainly see if we can provide more of this Product variety in the future.

You’ll find all these puzzles grouped in this PDF.

Shading puzzles are amongst our favorite puzzles here at GMPuzzles. They are our most crowded category amongst non-Sudoku styles as we now regularly offer four puzzle styles in this genre. But this shouldn’t be a huge surprise; when you have the original designers of Tapa (Serkan Yürekli) and Cross the Streams (Grant Fikes) as contributors, you’re going to see a lot of shading puzzles.

Because of the crowded genre, and many high vote recipients (this is our most popular category!), we awarded six puzzles the “Best of” status for 2013.

While a bit of a novelty, the Tapa Group Think by Serkan Yürekli which we posted in September was definitely enjoyed by a number of solvers.

The variation Tapa (Pentomino) from Dr. Sudoku also received a large number of votes in this category.

An absolutely spectacular Cross the Streams, Two Hard!, happened during Grant’s first week on the site. A lot of solvers gave it two thumbs up.

Nurikabe was the home to the most top ranked puzzles in this category, though. Tied for 2nd amongst the Nurikabe were the 72nd Prescription from April

and the Nurikabe Time puzzle from the second week of January which is the second “clock” theme to make the top of the listings.

But the winner of the category, with a few more votes than any other puzzle, was the “Crypt-Oceanography” variation written by Dr. Sudoku in May. Our test-solvers will remember well that this Nurikabe Cipher puzzle went through a few drafts before it was just right*.

You’ll find all of these excellent shading puzzles gathered together in this PDF.

* (That the world changed its four ocean model to a five ocean model in 2000 did not change the way Dr. Sudoku counts the oceans. Similarly, any planetary themed puzzles are still likely to include Pluto if it helps the logic.)

As we start to celebrate 2014, let’s look back at some of the best object placement puzzles from the last year. This genre involves placing things into a grid, usually with specific touching rules driving the bulk of the logic. We had 39 puzzles in this genre last year, and one runaway winner for best puzzle. First, the very good (but not the very best) in the category:

Battleships (Yajilin) was one of Grant’s early contributions here and, with a set of battleship pieces in the grid as Yajilin clues was quite clever and well received. (The doubled battleships aspects of the theme pushed it into the object placement and not loop categories.)

Shipping Lanes from May was also highly rated. This Battleships puzzle was actually one of two created with this title/general theme in 2013; the other was kept for The Art of Puzzles (and if Dr. Sudoku ever gets his act together to publish this you’ll get to see it too!).

Amongst regular-sized Star Battles, Tom’s Throwing Star from September was a recent puzzle with a fair amount of favorite votes (or favourite votes, as he’d have us spell it).

The super-sized Clown from August got a good number of votes too among the Star Battles, over a quarter of the solvers who finished it marked it a favorite which is the best ratio in the category.

But the puzzle with over 50% more votes than any other, the one that certainly went most outside the box in the category, was Grant’s Star Battle (Corrupted Regions). I’m sure you had the same reaction I did to reading the rule “Each region must contain some number of stars other than 2, including possibly no stars at all” — there’s no way that will work. And then it does. It may be a one-off puzzle, but it is the Best Object Placement Puzzle of 2013.

This PDF contains the Best of Object Placement category for 2013.

We had 45 Number Placement puzzles in 2013, mostly Skyscrapers and TomTom puzzles but also other styles like Smashed Sums. While variations did rather well in some of the other categories, our favorite Number Placement puzzles were mostly “classic”.

The one exception was the Even/Odd Skyscrapers from June with only shaded and unshaded cells to get started.

Two other skyscrapers earned a lot of votes as favorites: Mostly Five, from March

and Either/Or from February.

The others that fit this category were TomTom puzzles including Triple Play from June (also one of the hardest puzzles we’ve posted):

and 1/3/13 from our very first week of puzzles.

While some categories have a clear winner, we’d need another voting parameter to actually choose a winner here. Both Either/Or and 1/3/13 are tied at the top. The five “best” puzzles are grouped together in this PDF.

(A PDF of the puzzles from week 52 can be found here.)

There will be no new puzzles this week as we look back on the first 52 weeks (and 322 puzzle posts) at GMPuzzles. Over the next six days we will be presenting our “Best of 2013” selections, using data from the FAVE button at the bottom of each post. Because of a variable number of solvers over the year, the selection process included raw FAVE counts, FAVE/solver ratios, and internal discussions when those values brought up ties. Today, we present the nominees in our toughest category (with 77 entries) of BEST SUDOKU:

Big and Small from April was a Classic Sudoku with an uncommon separation of givens that also affected the logic of the solve.

Start Small from May was a Tile Sudoku that many found to be a good pedagogical example for how to solve this style of puzzle.

Boxed In from January was a Thermo-Sudoku with an interesting visual pattern but no givens. The logical path was highly influenced by the “box” theme and many solvers appreciated the very first required deduction.

It’s Sudoku Time from December was a late nominee but a popular one. This arrow sudoku resembles a clock with just 5 givens (at 12, 3, 6, and 9) to get the solver started.

And, by absolute vote count, the favorite sudoku of 2013 is:
Jekyll and Hyde, a consecutive sudoku from February that merges that genre with non-consecutive puzzles with a half empty/half full kind of theme.

The “Best Sudoku of 2013” are all gathered together in this PDF.

Tomorrow we will announce our best number placement puzzles from 2013.