1,000,000 Paperclip ($10,000) Sudoku Puzzlehunt Contest and On-going Puzzle Details
Summarizing content from Thomas’s recent YouTube posts, “A Story of Self-Setting Sudoku” had a major contest post released with The Final Boss? at the end of July. This is a trailhead for several different meta-puzzles involving content created and posted by Thomas since the spring of this year, particularly the posts in “A Story of Self-Setting Sudoku”.
The Wanted: Dead or Alive, Reward: 1,000,000 📎 (or cash equivalent) is real, unlike some of the cake. The approximate value of a paperclip is a penny, a unit of currency expected to go away soon, and the new phrase is “a paperclip for your thoughts” where players on the Discord have been getting small paperclips as incentives when good ideas are posted. This means the total prize pool is $10,000.
The contest is open to anyone, with the first person or group with a submission explaining their answers to The Final Boss? and anything that follows satisfactorily to our team taking the prize. Our team has final say in what is first (time-stamped email or message) and correct (matches answer and path to get there). Individual puzzles are being tracked for similar first submissions with smaller rewards. The major reward (2/3) is for completing everything and up to one-third will be earned along the way by solving pieces of the main hunt first; there are specific pre-assigned rewards, but without revealing the structure of the hunt we cannot share them here at this time.
The way the prize gets claimed can also take many forms because we don’t know that everyone needs such a prize but may still want GMPuzzles to support puzzles and puzzlemaking. If no one wins by the end of the year, the unclaimed prize funds will be split between NAMI and SudokuCon, two important groups to us. If someone submits a complete solution before the end of December 2025, some or all of the prize can be similarly donated (and we will find a way to still donate to NAMI and SudokuCon). The winner can also choose special prizes like custom puzzles created for the winner (depending on type of puzzle and if public or non-public, low X0,000 📎 per puzzle is ballpark), or video chats with our team members. They could even ask us to restart some logic puzzle (non-sudoku) content where this is the approximate budget for 3 months of puzzles. Finally, it can also be a monetary prize, as most might expect for a contest. We want to make it clear that the way to win is set, by solving puzzles through a mix of logic and skill, but how anyone chooses to accept their prize can be flexible to their own goals as a puzzle-solver and/or paperclip hoarder.
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Note that we do continue to post puzzles to “A Story of Self-Setting Sudoku”, and a lot of upcoming puzzles are going to look back at old “motris” livejournal posts, redigitizing an archive of otherwise less internet accessible puzzles. The focus is now on training Dr. Sudoku to make puzzles by seeing how a younger, aspiring puzzle maker went about their work. There will occasionally be updates to the puzzles and new themes. Rarely will there be any hint and never a new puzzle for the puzzle hunt in “A Story of Self-Setting Sudoku” after The Final Boss post. But these are still incredible Sudoku, belong in the GMPuzzles database, and if you’ve never solved them you deserve to see them.
Today’s webpost will be a very important first Sudoku post Thomas made in 2006, somehow entirely by hand in the course of one evening after being inspired with a fresh idea.