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.

I received a lot of “pre-criticism” about having made a Counting Puzzle for the USPC. I have been rather outstated as a solver in not liking these puzzles because of the difficulty of confirming one’s answer — particularly in the old -5 point days for a mistake that would frequently cost me for even attempting and getting close to the right answer. And I often don’t get the choice to skip it when I’m close to finishing the test.

But that doesn’t mean I’ve never been called on to write Counting Puzzles. I wrote a GAMES article/Puzzlecraft chapter on the topic. And I gave it another attempt on this USPC. Call it an experiment to see if I could make anything my audience would accept as a good puzzle.

My first concept was to make a heavy path puzzle with lots of forced segments due to arrows, but not a single solution to give it a “counting” aspect. While I figured good solvers would be able to get to a “trivial” state to count a handful of total paths, all of my initial designs ended up feeling more like a broken path puzzle than a good counting puzzle so a changed goals slightly. I wondered: can I make a few very simple counting challenges work together with some simple math to be a fair challenge. Basically, something where good observation could reduce the problem into something much more tractable. And if this is testing both observation and problem solving skills in an unfamiliar setting, all the better.

Even with the “simple” format below that even had the surprise of very basic multiplication built in, the successful answer rate was quite low compared to my own expectations. And at least one solver has complained about getting 99.991% of the correct answer and getting zero credit. In my evaluation, with three small counting puzzles and a meta puzzle of building the math equation, that answer is 75% correct in the same way some of the answers in the 52k range were. All from counting one of the component puzzles one lower than expected.

So, did you think this was an appropriate USPC challenge? Did this soften or strengthen opinions against counting puzzles? Are counting puzzles still the brussel sprouts of the USPC buffet? I’ve only heard positives from people that actually got the puzzle correct so I do have to think score results often bias counting puzzle reviews (my strongly negative reviews have certainly followed my average score of -5 on these puzzles over the years).

PDF

Theme: Symmetry, mainly

Rules: Count the number of different paths from Start (S) to Finish (F). You cannot use an intersection or a path segment more than once. Path segments with arrows can only be used in the indicated direction.

Answer String: For the USPC, the answer string was the number of paths. For this week, you can just hit the solved button on an honor system if you think you’ve solved it.

Solution: PDF

And if you want an extra challenge, solve this bonus puzzle where an arrow has been removed. It’s one step up from the original puzzle but should be just as simple to break into constituent parts if you’ve mastered the first.

A few weeks ago Giovanni P. asked what our visitors might think about “other puzzles.” His question was specific to word puzzles, but this week I put the question to the test when I posted our first “Puzzle Hunt” puzzle. The Monday puzzle was not announced as such. Instead it was meant to just look like an April Fools joke. But it already has the most FAVEs of any puzzle on the site. So what are “Puzzle Hunt” puzzles and what was really going on with that word search?

(more…)

PDF

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools)

Welcome to the new puzzle blog from Thomas Snyder, aka “Dr. Sudoku”, 3-time world sudoku champion and author of many books of puzzles including “The Art of Sudoku”. Here you will find a range of logic puzzles including number placement puzzles (such as Sudoku and TomTom), object placement (such as Battleships and Star Battle), region division (such as Fillomino and Cave), shading (such as Nurikabe and Tapa), path/loop (such as Slitherlink and Masyu) and many more.

Puzzles will get progressively harder throughout the week, so there will be easy puzzles for beginners on Monday and Tuesday to start the week and much harder puzzles by Friday and Saturday. Eventually there will be a random mix of many puzzle types every week, but as I start I will focus on two types each week, with Sudoku and TomTom leading the way. Puzzles will typically post at 9:00 AM Pacific Time.

This puzzle blog will have a few unique features. First, I want to actively track (and reward) the puzzle solvers. At the bottom of each post is a “solved” button. If you enter the correct answer string, your solution will be logged in. Eventually there will be leaderboards, contests, and prizes for people solving the puzzles. So if you solve the puzzles, log your success here. Mark your favorite puzzles too. So if a lot of solvers for example like TomTom over other styles, then you’ll see more of them here — and more TomTom books published.

Each puzzle has a “difficulty” posted too. This is just a recommendation from the expert/World Puzzle Championship level solvers who have helped test all the puzzles. The time has three values: the “Master” time, and then an “Expert” time (3x) and a “Novice” time (10x). Whatever level solver you are, these ratings should give you a sense of how hard a puzzle might be, and also give you a real sense of how well you are solving if you want to time yourself. But don’t start the stopwatch if you are just here for fun!

For any puzzle you really like, click on the tags to the left for more examples. Besides the posted puzzles, I will be releasing books with all of these puzzle styles. For Sudoku and Sudoku Variations and TomTom I already have books available for purchase. For the other styles, new titles like “The Art of Puzzles” will be coming soon.

This will be an exciting project, and I hope to see you visiting here a lot in the future. And if you have any recommendations for new puzzle styles, or want to make your own puzzle contributions here, just email me to start a dialogue.

Rules: The puzzle in this post is in the GMPuzzles logo. This is a Wordoku with a repeated letter so follow standard sudoku rules with a slight twist.

Time Standard: Sudoku Master = 2:30, Expert = 7:30, Novice = 25:00

Answer Check: USING CAPITAL LETTERS, enter the 8th row from left to right, followed by a comma, and then the 5th column from top to bottom (e.g. “GMPUZZLES,GMPUZZLES”)

Solution: PDF