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.