Best of 2013: Shading Puzzles
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.)
Lots of good choices from the past year here. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were other great ones that didn’t make the cut. The remaining two categories (Loop and Division [?]) also have a lot of good candidates, so I’m interested to see what those look like.
As to the point about original puzzles, I think offering the contributing puzzlemakers a platform to get some of their signature types known is a great idea. All of you have put out some great puzzles that don’t fit as cleanly with one of the six main types over the year, and I think they help to spice up the site’s offerings overall. Kudos should go to Serkan especially, for the various one-offs he contributed during his stay here.
Thank you for a nice year of puzzles everyone. I look forward to the next year and some more killer conundrums.
I’ll be honest: I think Dr. Sudoku’s very challenging Cross the Streams prescription was at least as worthy of appearing on here as my Two Hard. But clearly your readers think otherwise. 🙂
Rise and Fall was the second highest rated Cross the Streams (close to others in votes, but highest in fave/solve ratio). But even I agree that Two Hard was quite special.