Our past variety week featuring the six styles in Grandmaster Puzzles Quarterly 3 is gathered in this PDF and the solutions are in this PDF. We will be releasing GPQ3 in a few more weeks.

The daily solution videos (including one from Cracking the Cryptic) are on the posts and linked below:

The next week of puzzles will feature Kakuro, with three classic puzzles and three variations. We will also have a Penpa-Edit tools update to introduce solution tracking / playback features (more details to come) as well as more details on Dr. Sudoku including a fundraising drive for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).

I haven’t been able to share more details with you on my mental health recently (not mental illness, although the first being in bad shape can lead to the other!). I wanted to give you all this update, possibly more to come later, as you all watch out for the site and for me.

Over my life, I have managed what I have called hypomanic states that can include (short) bursts of high productivity, creativity, the need to do extensive walking or running to control one’s thoughts, and diminished sleep. This past week, starting ~March 13th and provoked primarily from stresses at my scientific work, was the first time I had a full on manic episode that built over 3-4 days, including the release of an unusual amount of ideas in raw/vocal and short/tweeted form from usually dormant accounts. Over March 17th-20th, for reasons I won’t share here although they don’t involve self hurt/harm or trying to hurt/harm others, I was confined to a psychiatric ward in San Mateo for 72 hours of evaluation. I received both individual and group therapy, and have started to get better but am not yet well. Today, I was released from that facility and have my best friend watching out for me as I get resettled in my San Bruno home. I have an on-going treatment plan including on-going outpatient group/individual therapy and medications that I will be managing.

Most of the above is considered my protected health information, but I am openly sharing it because the discussion of mental health is very poor in the United States and possibly across the world. I’m not interested in hiding what I just went through, but learning more about it and making sure it doesn’t happen again to me and by proxy to others struggling with the borderline of hypomanic and manic states.

Over the coming weeks I will mostly be recuperating, and helping GMPuzzles a bit will be part of my recovery. This business is not profitable yet, but I view it as a big contribution back towards mental health given the numerous other authors and puzzle solvers who find comfort in the logic we put into the world each day. A community of both authors and solvers who may be on the autism spectrum or have dealt with depression, suicidal thoughts, or other challenging things, but been appropriately cautious to share them externally. I’m hopeful that in the coming weeks the visibility of my mental break will help us update how we all try to communicate together, by talking to people rather than talking at people, at least until we understand where they may be coming from.

I will probably be moving all of this discussion forward in other channels like my LinkedIn and not in our puzzle feed so you do not need to engage further if you do not want to.

Thanks for all your thoughts and support through the years but particularly these last few days,
Thomas (aka Dr. Sudoku)

Edited to add: Also see these videos: video 1 and video 2 for a little more commentary about where my head is at.

Edited again to add: Here is a self-contained video analyzing the week of the breakdown, some aspects of how I track my mental health, and more.

Our past Tapa-Like Loop week is gathered in this PDF and the solutions are in this PDF. More Tapa-Like Loop puzzles can be found here.

The daily solution videos are on the posts and linked below:

The next week of puzzles will be a variety mix in six different styles. All of these styles are part of the third issue of our Grandmaster Puzzles Quarterly series being completed soon.

Our past Araf week is gathered in this PDF and the solutions are in this PDF. More Araf puzzles can be found here.

The daily solution videos are on the posts and linked below:

The next week of puzzles will feature Tapa-Like Loop.

Our past Tight Fit and Consecutive Pairs Sudoku week is gathered in this PDF and the solutions are in this PDF. Both of these styles are part of our latest Masterpiece Sudoku Mix books. If you purchase these books together (or any two Masterpiece Sudoku Mix books with discount code MASTERPIECE), you’ll receive a 10% discount at checkout.

The daily solution videos are on the posts and linked below:

The next week of puzzles will feature Araf puzzles.

Today we’ve released the latest editions in our Masterpiece Sudoku Mix series. Both collections (Tight Fit Sudoku and Consecutive Pairs Sudoku) contain 25 sudoku that are masterpieces of visual and logical style, written by some of the best puzzle designers in the world. If you purchase these books together (or any two mix books with discount code MASTERPIECE), you’ll receive a 10% discount at checkout.

Note: We have not set up a digital solving option for these books yet (we have only started this for the Starter Packs but later in this year should come back). We will likely prioritize certain genres over certain book series when adding digital solving to our existing books, and some types like Tight Fit Sudoku are still in the worse part of interface support in my view.

Our past Star Battle week is gathered in this PDF and the solutions are in this PDF. More books containing Star Battle puzzles can be found here.

The daily solution videos are on the posts and linked below:

The next week of puzzles will feature Tight Fit Sudoku and Consecutive Pairs Sudoku, both types in our latest Masterpiece Sudoku Mixes (see upcoming post for more details).

We’ve just published the first volume of a new series of “Starter Packs”, books with good easy to medium (Monday to Wednesday) puzzles for some of our different puzzle genres. The first volume, Starter Pack 1: Fillomino features one of our favorite region division puzzles and comes with 30 hand-crafted puzzles by Grant Fikes.

This is also the first e-book from us that includes a set of links to Penpa-Edit versions of the puzzles for online solving. While we are still working to create a more immersive online solving experience in the future, people who buy this book will find a set of 30 web-links at the back to be able to digitally solve all of the puzzles too.

The next Starter Pack will be coming out in a couple months and will feature Tapa by Serkan Yürekli.

Our past variety mix week, with slightly easier than usual puzzles to pair with our “Starter Pack” series, has its puzzles gathered together in this PDF and the solutions are in this PDF. We’re putting the finishing touches on Starter Pack 1: Fillomino by Grant Fikes (including building very basic digital solving/Penpa option for the book) and will release that in next day.

The daily solution videos are on the posts and linked below:

The next week of puzzles will feature Star Battle, one of our favorite puzzle styles, and will have five classic and one variation during the week.

I wanted to start some of our 2022 updates for the year by sharing this draft schedule for our books, with most detail set for the first six months of the year. We are continuing our Grandmaster Puzzles Quarterly and Masterpiece Sudoku Mix series that we launched in 2021, and also starting a new, accessible puzzle series of “Starter Packs” for people to get into some of our different logic styles. In the same style as the Intro to GMPuzzles books, these Starter Packs will contain ~30 puzzles for ~$1.50 and all puzzles are from 1-2.5 stars in approximate difficulty. Eventually, as we release these books, we will also rebuild the web flow for these styles so that there is a way besides the “blog” to learn about the puzzles, how to use Penpa, and so on.

Book list:
1. Shading Variety Collection by Prasanna Seshadri (January)
2. Starter Pack 1: Fillomino by Grant Fikes (February)
3. Masterpiece Sudoku Mixes 5 and 6 (Tight Fit Sudoku and Consecutive Pairs Sudoku) (early March)
4. Grandmaster Puzzles Quarterly 3 featuring Thermo-Sudoku, Skyscrapers, Battleships, Cross the Streams, Kuromasu, Balance Loop (late March)
5. Starter Pack 2: Tapa by Serkan Yürekli (April)
6. Slitherlink and Variations 2 (April)
7. Tapa and Variations 3 (May)
8. Starter Pack 3: TomTom by Thomas Snyder (June)
9. Grandmaster Puzzles Quarterly 4 featuring Even/Odd Sudoku, Japanese Sums, Minesweeper, Nurikabe, Pentominous, Castle Wall (late June)
10. Masterpiece Sudoku Mixes 7 and 8 (July)
11. Starter Pack 4: Slitherlink by Takeya Saikachi (late July/early August)
12. Loop Variety Collection 2 (August)
13. Grandmaster Puzzles Quarterly 5 (September)
14. TBD title (October)
15. Starter Pack 5: Star Battle by JinHoo Ahn (October)
16. TBD title (November)
17. Starter Pack 6: Jigsaw Sudoku by Thomas Snyder (December)
18. Grandmaster Puzzles Quarterly 6 (December)

The eighteen book schedule is ambitious but lets us diversify the kinds of titles and different puzzles we are publishing while also taking up new goals like getting Penpa/digital solving forms of these by sometime this year.

Not on the “official” list, but part of projects I am working on separately, are releases containing our old patron puzzles including our “Giant” puzzles, starting a Giants annual book, and rereleasing some of my older books of sudoku variants and TomTom puzzles. There is also a very different but interesting puzzle collection book that has been stuck in editing that we hope to get out.

Paired with this schedule, we have also started to look at how easily we can set up a “subscription” in our book store to automatically release these titles to people who want to have all books in a given series like GPQ or who want all books that we publish.