Here are our best Number Placement puzzles of 2016 (excluding Sudoku which is treated as its own category). We posted 28 Number Placement puzzles on the web throughout the year.

2016 saw the official addition of Kakuro to our puzzle makeup with a lot of good puzzles. This Kakuro (Double) puzzle from Grant Fikes with a Cloverleaf pattern earned a fair number of votes.

Dr. Sudoku added a Sudoku-like unique digit theme to this Hundred puzzle, a style originally created by Vladimir Portugalov. While the style has simple instructions, the intended logical path in this puzzle requires a deduction we haven’t seen in a Hundred puzzle before.

A lot of our best of puzzles this year were part of our patrons weeks, where our authors made requested puzzles from our super grandmaster patrons. This Multi-Skyscrapers variation by Serkan Yürekli tied for the most votes in the category.

Our best Number Placement Puzzle of 2016 was another Kakuro (Double) puzzle from Serkan Yürekli which we posted near Valentine’s Day. More Double Kakuro (and other doubled puzzles) will be in the Art of Puzzles 2, including several more gems from Serkan.

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Today we’ll look back at our best puzzles of 2016, using data from the FAVE button at the bottom of each post. The selection process included raw FAVE counts, FAVE/solver ratios, and internal discussions if those values brought up ties.

We posted 227 total web puzzles in 2016 and have now crossed >1,000 puzzles online with nearly another thousand in our e-books. I am incredibly proud that we have never released a broken puzzle (i.e., a puzzle with zero solutions/too many solutions). We also restarted our Patreon rewards and got our e-store organized to have an easier path to release puzzles to solvers. While we didn’t release all the titles we wanted to in 2016, particularly the long-delayed The Art of Puzzles 2, the infrastructure we built up last year should help us reach our target of a dozen new e-book collections in 2017. A priority for us this year is a new Sudoku magazine that, like our puzzle titles, will bring together the incredible puzzles from the best puzzle designers for all who love puzzles.

We released 31 sudoku puzzles on the website last year. One of our best sudoku is this “sleepy” Thermo-Sudoku from Prasanna Seshadri with a clever logical path.

Another highly rated puzzle was this Killer Sudoku by Serkan Yürekli with a Last Ones theme in the cage clues.

The last two “best of” puzzles came out of a challenge Serkan had with Thomas to try to make a Tight Fit Sudoku that would take at least five minutes to solve. This is a challenging feat given the compact nature of a Tight Fit Sudoku. When Serkan couldn’t do this with classic Tight Fit puzzles he went on to make variations of Tight Fit Sudoku in a quite enjoyable week of puzzles. Dr. Sudoku’s own attempt at a five-minute puzzle, with just odd given digits, required a unique Aha to get to the solution logically — but it still only took three and a half minutes for our best solvers. It was a Patron bonus for that week and earned one of the highest FAVE/solver ratios for the year. [Note: this is one of two patron bonuses to win a Best Of award this year, but they’ll stay blurred on this site.]

Coming back to Serkan’s week of Tight Fit puzzles, the clear winner for Best Sudoku of 2016 was the Tight Fit Sudoku (Samurai) that closed out the Tight Fit Variations week. While quite difficult, it has a lot of novel logical steps and is a true standout puzzle.

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With the most votes of any puzzle, this is also our Puzzle of the Year.

All of the puzzles selected by our solvers as the “Best of 2015” are gathered in this PDF.

We’ll be back next week with new puzzles, and some thoughts on what is ahead in 2016 for GMPuzzles.

Here are our best Shading puzzles of 2015. As shading puzzles are (still) our most frequent category with 42 posts, there are five awards this year with just four in the other categories.

Leading off this list is a very neat geometry of cages in this Nanro by Grant Fikes.

This classic Tapa puzzle by Tapio Saarinen with an antisymmetry theme also got a lot of Fave votes.

Hex week was by far our most favorited week of puzzles in 2015, and every puzzle from that week was either a Best of … winner or a close runner-up. In the shading genre, Prasanna Seshadri’s Tapa (Hex) was amongst the best shading puzzles of 2015.

Also from Hex week, this SLICY by Thomas Snyder (a LITS variant) was a top shading puzzle and tied for third for votes across the year.

The best puzzle in this category, and the best puzzle of the year based on number of Fave votes, was this Unique Clues variation of Tapa by Tapio Saarinen. It was truly a special puzzle with many different insights hidden in a quite elegant package.

Here are our best Region Division puzzles of 2015.

While the year would mostly belong to great Fillomino puzzles, this Cave puzzle by Thomas Snyder with an antisymmetry theme earned a “Best of …” honor.

Grant Fikes’ Valentine’s Day Fillomino earned a lot of love from our solvers.

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Palmer Mebane’s Fillomino “Married or Single?” also earned a fair share of Fave votes.

The most votes in this category though, and the second most favorited puzzle of 2015, was the Shape Fillomino by Palmer Mebane written for one of our patrons.

Here are our best Loop/Path puzzles of 2015.

The first best “Loop” puzzle is a hybrid with object placement and featured twelve pentomino shaped loops. Serkan Yürekli wrote this favorited Slitherlink (Pentomino) puzzle.

Prasanna Seshadri introduced a new puzzle style this year in the form of Balance Loop; this particular puzzle was one of the best of 2015.

Prasanna included Balance Loop as part of his quite special Birthday Loop mix. Alongside his 100th puzzle spectacular, Prasanna definitely made a lot of great combo/other puzzles this year.

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The best 2015 Loop/Path puzzle came from our newest contributing puzzlemaster. With just two clues, Murat Can Tonta’s Snake Egg still yielded an elegant and surprising challenge.

Here are our best Object Placement puzzles of 2015.

Pentominoes are a frequent element in this category and were part of several of our best puzzles including this Pentopia from Grant Fikes with only single-direction clues.

Two Star Battle puzzles got very high marks this year, both from guest contributors. Carl Worth gave us a theme based around Pentominoes with a smooth solve.

Also quite special was this Star Battle from Bryce Herdt with “twin” galaxies across the top and both halves.

Finally, one of the best object placement puzzles of 2015 was this tough Statue Park from Palmer Mebane with an antisymmetry theme.

Here are our best Number Placement puzzles of 2015 (excluding Sudoku which is treated as its own category).

Creating a complete puzzle taxonomy is challenging. Here at GMPuzzles we limit ourselves to just five logic puzzle categories, but that means our “number” placement term may seem a misnomer when you see logic puzzles with letters or words like our first winner here. At GMPuzzles, whenever a transformation of letters into numbers or other symbols could leave a fundamentally identical puzzle, we consider “Number Placement” to be the proper categorization. That said, this recent Scrabble variant from Murat Can Tonta — despite not yet having a lot of solvers — got a lot of Faves in December.

Our remaining “best” puzzles in this category are more obviously number placement puzzles; all received approximately the same number of votes. First is a classic Skyscrapers puzzle from Tom Collyer with a great solving path.

This Skyscrapers (Sum) variant by Thomas Snyder, part of a New Year’s week highlighting 2014 –> 2015, also received a lot of votes.

Finally, this Kakuro (Hex) from Serkan Yürekli was another of our best Number Placement puzzles of 2015.

While my relocation back to the San Francisco area and new job commitments limited our posts in 2015 compared to other years, we still had almost 200 puzzle posts in 2015 and many amazing puzzles. Today we will be presenting the “Best of 2015” selections, using data from the FAVE button at the bottom of each post. Because of a variable number of solvers over the year (particularly after the hiatus), the selection process included raw FAVE counts, FAVE/solver ratios, and internal discussions when those values brought up ties. We start with our BEST SUDOKU.

This past year, the best Sudoku puzzles featured either arithmetic constraints or series-based constraints. One of our best sudoku featured both, namely this Arrow/Thermo-Sudoku by Prasanna Seshadri.

Another highly rated puzzle was this Killer Sudoku by Serkan Yürekli.

The highest ratings though went to two Thermo-Sudoku. Both were puzzles originally created for the magazines Will Shortz’s Sudoku and Sudoku Spectacular where we regularly contribute puzzles. But these were kept for this site due to their unique look and solving feel.

On the easier end was this very fun Thermo-Sudoku from guest contributor Ashish Kumar.

And on the harder end was this self-titled “THERMO” puzzle from Dr. Sudoku.

With new styles Nanro and Kurotto joining Tapa, Nurikabe, Cross the Streams, and LITS this year, shading puzzles are now by far the most common style of puzzle we post at Grandmaster Puzzles (86 total posts in 2014). As a result, we’re going to give out a few more awards for the Best Shading puzzles than in the other categories.

Half of our “April Fool’s” week puzzles got very high ratings, including this Nanro from Prasanna Seshadri:

This LITS puzzle from Palmer Mebane also received a lot of praise for a simple but elegant solving theme:

Tapa continues to be one of our most popular puzzle styles, both in regular form or as a variation. We had three highly rated “best” Tapa puzzles this year. Amazingly, they all ended up using the same general theme. Will Shortz sometimes remarks that “As human beings, we have a natural compulsion to fill empty spaces.” Well, our favorite Tapa all featured impressive empty spaces that solvers would need to fill. Starting the year was this Tapa Triomino variation by Prasanna Seshadri called “Open Middle”:

Then in May came “Open Spaces” by Murat Can Tonta:

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Then in October, perhaps inspired by what came before, John Bulten provided “White Hole”:

While really a hybrid of a shading puzzle and a loop puzzle, Serkan Yürekli’s Nurikabe Loop “The Magic of 23” had the magic to make this list:

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Finally, we had some noteworthy Cross the Streams puzzles. Murat Can Tonta used a lot of just four basic clues in this masterpiece:

But the best Shading puzzle, and the last of the puzzles tied for Puzzle of the Year (with the TomTomTom, and the C Major Cipher Fillomino) was Grant Fikes’ audiobook form of a Cross the Streams puzzle. There isn’t really a puzzle to show here, just an MP3 link for you to hear.

All of the Best Shading puzzles for 2014 have been gathered in this PDF.