Doctor’s Note – Week 13
Last week saw the release of Puzzlecraft: The Ultimate Guide on How to Construct Every Kind of Puzzle, a really incredible project with Mike Selinker that was an extension of our GAMES Magazine articles that have run for many years (I joined Mike around article #48 when he wanted to write on how to construct Battleships. I’ve been part of the process ever since as we now approach #100). The title seems overly broad, but I challenge anyone to come up with a puzzle style that isn’t covered in the book.
Last week also saw Mike and I finish construction on a book you’ll get to see next year, Tile Crosswords, a word puzzle style that we developed out of the logic puzzle “Crack-It-On” that first appeared at the WPC in Hungary in the late 90s. You might not picture me as someone who fills grids with letters that have a meaning when considered as intact strings, let alone then provides sets of letters outside the grid that also form strings that evoke the sets of letters that are in the grid — certainly if I write about making word grids and cluing them that way it would seem impossible that I even speak English — but it is something I’ve been increasingly finding joy in doing.
The reason I mention all this is to give you some forewarning that over the coming months we may have other puzzle types than just sudoku and abstract logic puzzles here. Just as with the Hidden Contest that ended last week, I intend Grandmaster Puzzles to have all the kinds of puzzles I would like to solve, but with a friendly mix of easy to hard and lots of different genres so that if today is not your cup of tea, then tomorrow probably is. You may only think of me as a logic puzzle constructor, but working with Mike over the last few years has really developed my puzzle-making chops in almost every area.
Whatever puzzles we release here, they should still be worthy in their genres of being called masterpieces.
Sincerely,
Dr. S
Eagerly looking forward to reading your books !
Oh, I didn’t realize the Puzzlecraft book was out already! I’ve been looking forward to it for a while, and I can’t wait to take a look at it. One question, though: How much of it is reprints from the Games column, and how much is new material?
I think you’ll notice many improvements.
All the puzzles are new for the book and not from the original columns. So that means all the puzzle-specific advice is new, as would be your solving experience.
Several of the text sections were reworked; there is only so much you can do on a page in a magazine and more when you have the space. Mike had written a good piece on Sudoku, for example, before I ever came on to write a piece. So I started from scratch for a book section of several pages talking about sudoku and variants and laying the foundation for building other logic problems.
So even if you’ve seen a lot of columns, I’d still say it is a great buy.
I bought the puzzlecraft book as much or more as a reference on puzzle types as an instructional book. Having already made my purchase, however, it’s great to hear that all the puzzles in the book are all-new.
It was also great to see this book make it to Canadian bookstores so quickly – it can often take three months or more after release. (I still haven’t seen Sit and Solve Tight Fit Sudoku here, so it’s a good thing I picked it up at the start of March.)
On a different subject from this post… speaking as a someone with word puzzle experience in general and crossword experience in particular, there are proportionally more people out there who can make a good word puzzle/crossword puzzle than there are who can make a good logic puzzle at this time, I think. Also, because people have been mining the word and crossword puzzle territories for much longer here in North America, really good puzzle ideas which are completely original are harder to come by.
This is not to discourage you from adding word puzzles to the Grandmaster Puzzles repertoire. Rather, it’s to encourage you to keep your standards high when you do, because you will almost certainly be receiving submissions on a continuum from good to spectacular, and it will be easy over to time to let your standards slip so that in the end you will have gone from publishing Grandmaster-level puzzles to those which are good, but nothing special.