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Here are our best Sudoku puzzles of 2019, selected from the 31 web posts in this category:
Our first favorite puzzle was a very nicely themed Killer Sudoku by Serkan Yürekli with a rocket theme and a visual countdown in the grid.
Guest contributor Chris Green put together a paired set of Tight Fit Sudoku with a really interesting challenge that stretched the way you tend to think about this style.
Our next two top Sudoku are both clueless varieties. First, from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku, is this clueless Arrow Sudoku.
Ashish Kumar made a clueless Thermo-Sudoku in preparation for the World Puzzle Championship that was also one of our top puzzles.
But the overall best sudoku of 2019 goes to an unusual puzzle which was a Birthday Surprise Sudoku from Prasanna Seshadri that was a nearly perfect puzzle for his 28th birthday.
All of these best Sudoku puzzles are collected in this PDF file.
Our most recent week of Sudoku puzzles can be found in this PDF and the solutions are all grouped in this PDF and have also been linked to the individual posts.
This week’s video solution talkthrough is for Grant Fikes’s Killer Sudoku puzzle (and I approached it as more of a blind solve tutorial as a change of pace as I hadn’t done the puzzle in awhile.)
We have also been highlight favorite old puzzles where we have available solution videos. Serkan Yürekli made this hard Killer Sudoku which we posted almost 6 years ago. If you haven’t tried it yet, please do; if you get stuck, here are some tips:
Later today we will be back with our first “Best of 2019” post highlighting Sudoku.
This coming week we will be featuring Star Battle puzzles.
A reminder that this June, as part of our reopening, we have a special 20% discount on all titles in the shop (automatically applied at checkout) so please check out the store if you want to purchase some puzzle PDFs.
Our first 2020 week of puzzles can be found in this PDF and the solutions are all grouped in this PDF and have been linked to the individual posts.
This week’s video talkthrough is for Elyot Grant’s interesting Fillomino puzzle.
Next week we will be featuring Sudoku puzzles including some variations.
It is great to be back, which means we met our goals of relaunching our e-book store alongside our weekly web puzzles. For the whole month of June, we have a 20% discount on all titles in the shop (automatically applied at checkout) so please check out the store if you want to purchase some puzzle PDFs.
There are more updates to come later in the year as we strive to improve the GMPuzzles community experience. One of those areas to is expand our Sunday content, including a return of our “Ask Dr. Sudoku” column. One topic we will plan to discuss soon is related to a comment from this week’s Star Battle puzzle — how should we integrate electronic solving options to our web posts and books. If you have other questions or suggested topics for us, please share as comments and we’ll select some for future posts.
We also are overdue to post our “Best Puzzles of 2019”, and we will start that next Sunday with our Best Sudoku of 2019. But as an early preview, and as the extra solution video for this week, we wanted to link to one of our very best (and trickiest) puzzles of 2019, this Fillomino from John Bulten from January 2019. In case you missed it, please try it now; tips if you get stuck are in the solution video below.
Sunday is going to be a day when we feature solution videos to our puzzles. Today we’re pleased to have a video for this morning’s Consecutive Pairs Sudoku from Cracking the Cryptic / Simon Anthony.
Also, we have just relaunched a new version of our e-store for our puzzle PDF books, which should be much easier to use with more payment options, cart functionality, search functionality for authors and genres, notifications when PDFs are updated, …. Note that the old accounts / passwords will not work here but we can share prior purchases with you if you need to grab the downloads again.
We’re still doing some visual improvements as many of our books never had covers or online examples. We will likely highlight one old title each week with sample puzzles while we update the catalog.
For the whole month of June, we will have a 20% discount on all titles in the shop (automatically applied at checkout). So this is a great time to catch up on any past collections from GMPuzzles that you may have missed. And please tell us if you run into any issues with the new store.
Tomorrow marks the official restart of daily puzzle content here. The first week will feature a variety mix of puzzles across six genres, and later weeks in June will focus on Sudoku, Star Battle, and Pentominous puzzles. We have some other updates we’ll be rolling out alongside launch, including an update to our e-store, and more detail will be coming on that over the next day. For now, enjoy one last teaser puzzle with a countdown theme.
or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools)
Theme: Countdown to 1
Author/Opus: This is the 358th puzzle from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku.
Rules: Standard Consecutive Pairs Sudoku rules although this puzzle is formatted with bars and not dots for a different visual effect. (If a gray bar is given between two adjacent cells, then the two numbers in those cells must be consecutive. Note not all gray bars are given; adjacent cells without a bar may contain either consecutive numbers or nonconsecutive numbers.)
Solution:PDF; a solution video is also available here.
June 1st will be the reopening of GMPuzzles. In recent years we have had on weeks and off weeks, but with this relaunch we are planning to have content every week. Monday through Saturdays will be new puzzles, with increasing difficulty throughout the week. There will be a mix of variety weeks and single puzzle genre weeks. On Sundays we will be releasing solution images for all of the puzzles, as well as a solution video walkthrough for one of our puzzles. While these solutions have historically been “rewards” for our subscribers, we hope that sharing them more broadly will help expand our community and help people learn how to solve our hardest puzzles.
We’ll have info on some other changes soon; for now, enjoy this Countdown TomTom.
Note: Follow this link for other TomTom. If you are new to this puzzle type, here are our easiest TomTom to get started on. More TomTom puzzles can be found in The Art of Puzzles, and in our beginner-friendly collection Intro to GMPuzzles by Serkan Yürekli.
It has certainly been a challenging start to 2020, but we’re excited to announce that we will be back with daily content starting in June. More info soon; for now, enjoy this Countdown Star Battle.
We just added the Plenty o’ Pentominous 2 ebook from Grant Fikes and Murat Can Tonta to our web store. These two fantastic authors have constructed 53 more creative Pentominous puzzles including some new highly original themes. So if you enjoyed their first Pentominous collection (or even, on the other extreme, if you’ve never solved a Pentominous before) you may want to check out this new book.
While I don’t have another update on when GMPuzzles will begin posting web puzzles again, that is in part because of a different, non-puzzle update from me. After almost five years at Verily Life Sciences (formerly Google), most recently as the Head of Computational Biology, I just left that job. I will be returning to Adaptive Biotechnologies as VP/science lead for their immunosequencing diagnostics program in early March. I’ll be splitting time in Seattle and San Francisco for this new role, and it will be the main focus of my time for the next several years. (I’m still hopeful that if I can successfully hand off most GMPuzzles responsibilities to others in the coming months, this should not have too large an effect on this site going forward; thanks again for your patience as I work through this life transition.)
This weekend is the MIT Mystery Hunt and Grandmaster Puzzles is very happy to be a sponsor of this puzzle event in 2020.
If you are new to this site, there are lots of different fun genres of logic puzzles to explore and you can follow some of the links to the left to find these genres including our easiest puzzles to get started. The Intro to GMPuzzles and Logic Puzzles 101 books are some great titles to try as well.
As part of the pre-Hunt activities for the team I compete with, I created the attached puzzle set in the style of a Mystery Hunt puzzle. Like most puzzlehunt puzzles, it is missing some of the instructions you may want to have but I think you may still be able to figure it out. It has a final answer which is a word/phrase. We will post some hints and/or the answer in the coming weeks.
