About Our Blog (README!)

Welcome to Grandmaster Puzzles, a puzzle blog started by Thomas Snyder, aka “Dr. Sudoku”, 3-time world sudoku champion and author of many books of puzzles including “The Art of Sudoku”. We now have several contributing authors providing some of the best logic puzzles around. Here you will find a range of logic puzzle styles 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 get progressively harder throughout the week, so there will be easier puzzles for beginners on Monday and Tuesday to start the week and much harder puzzles by Friday and Saturday. If you are new to a puzzle type, it is definitely recommended that you start on some of the easier entries to start. Besides the day of the week, one indication of difficulty is the time of the puzzle. There are three values: the “Grandmaster” time, which is set based on how our best test-solvers do (and as world puzzle champions, they can be quite fast). The “Master” time is a target for very experienced puzzlers who might be around 10th place on the US Sudoku/Puzzle Championship each year. The “Expert” time is a target for good puzzlers and is always twice the Master time. If you are just getting started with these puzzle styles, all of these times will be particularly challenging to reach. Don’t fret. Just solve for fun as you get started. As you gradually improve, see if you can start to reach Expert more frequently and then possibly even Master or better. The relative times are a close proxy to the difficulty of the puzzle within its style. A particularly high number for the time should be a warning that you might need to block out a lot more time to get through what will be an unusual, and unusually difficult, puzzle.

One feature created for this blog is the FAVE/SOLVED button at the end of each post (this requires JavaScript to be seen). I want the puzzle solvers to be able to actively track what they’ve enjoyed and what they’ve finished. This also lets me reward the persistent solvers with prizes or live leaderboards eventually. So, when you finish a puzzle, go to the bottom of the post and click the SOLVED button and enter the answer string. Celebrate your success! Based on FAVE votes in 2013, we chose a set of “Best of 2013” puzzles and these are a great place to get started although several of the puzzles will be challenging.

There are also sometimes tutorials for how to solve the puzzles in the “Ask Dr. Sudoku” series. Look for these posts for both general and specific tips about puzzle solving. 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.

  • Patrick says:

    One thing I think it would be cool to see on this site in the future besides the current solving tutorials would be explanations/tutorials on how to design certain kinds of logic puzzles.

  • Avatar photo drsudoku says:

    I have a book out by April that does all of that. So preorder Puzzlecraft if you want to know some tips to make almost all these kinds of puzzles.

  • Ravi says:

    Hi,
    Is it possible to add an item (UI) to each puzzle where users can rate the puzzle on a scale of 1-10 stars ?
    Currently the site is great even without that, thought it would be nice to have, not even sure of the idea whether how mush useful it will be, so just suggesting it.

    Regards,
    Ravi

    • Avatar photo drsudoku says:

      Would you accept 1-5 stars? Having a 1-5 star system is on my list for our web developer right now. Hopefully it will be ready in a couple months at the latest. We also have plans to greatly improve the ability for someone to look up which puzzles they have/have not solved, and some other things too.

  • DGPArtist says:

    Over the holidays I’ve been trying to go back and complete unsolved puzzles. Wondered if there was anyway to search these at the moment. From your comment above it looks like you are looking into it, any progress?

    • Avatar photo drsudoku says:

      We’ve been slow to make some of the updates I talked about above, but I’m prioritizing the search/calendar view of “solved” puzzles when our web developer has time. Hopefully this will be done before spring 2015.

      • DGPArtist says:

        Awesome. Wanted to say I also like the new sidebar categories search. Looks neat and has everything covered. Good work.

  • Ace Zhu says:

    Hello Dr. Sudoku,

    I’m looking for you email but couldn’t find one. So I will post here. I’m working on a game called Rated Sudoku(for PC) and I am looking for a few dozen puzzles for the campaign mode. Am I allowed to use classic Sudoku puzzles that are published on this website in my game?

    • Avatar photo drsudoku says:

      Our puzzles are all posted under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. There are several parts to that but the NonCommercial is key to your question. If you are selling the game, you cannot use our puzzles without negotiating a separate license to compensate us for the puzzles.

      That may or may not be something you are interested in doing; please email us using the “Contact us here” address at the very bottom of the web page if you want to discuss further.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.