With new styles Nanro and Kurotto joining Tapa, Nurikabe, Cross the Streams, and LITS this year, shading puzzles are now by far the most common style of puzzle we post at Grandmaster Puzzles (86 total posts in 2014). As a result, we’re going to give out a few more awards for the Best Shading puzzles than in the other categories.

Half of our “April Fool’s” week puzzles got very high ratings, including this Nanro from Prasanna Seshadri:

This LITS puzzle from Palmer Mebane also received a lot of praise for a simple but elegant solving theme:

Tapa continues to be one of our most popular puzzle styles, both in regular form or as a variation. We had three highly rated “best” Tapa puzzles this year. Amazingly, they all ended up using the same general theme. Will Shortz sometimes remarks that “As human beings, we have a natural compulsion to fill empty spaces.” Well, our favorite Tapa all featured impressive empty spaces that solvers would need to fill. Starting the year was this Tapa Triomino variation by Prasanna Seshadri called “Open Middle”:

Then in May came “Open Spaces” by Murat Can Tonta:

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Then in October, perhaps inspired by what came before, John Bulten provided “White Hole”:

While really a hybrid of a shading puzzle and a loop puzzle, Serkan Yürekli’s Nurikabe Loop “The Magic of 23” had the magic to make this list:

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Finally, we had some noteworthy Cross the Streams puzzles. Murat Can Tonta used a lot of just four basic clues in this masterpiece:

But the best Shading puzzle, and the last of the puzzles tied for Puzzle of the Year (with the TomTomTom, and the C Major Cipher Fillomino) was Grant Fikes’ audiobook form of a Cross the Streams puzzle. There isn’t really a puzzle to show here, just an MP3 link for you to hear.

All of the Best Shading puzzles for 2014 have been gathered in this PDF.

Region Division puzzles made up a total of 64 posts, and had some of the highest rankings of all of our puzzles making this an incredibly tight category.

One puzzle with a very high FAVE/solver ratio was this creative “Infinity!” Araf from Serkan Yürekli:

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While many of our best Cave puzzles were contained in our ebooks this year, Thomas Snyder’s Product Cave from January garnered a lot of Favorite votes:

Fillomino puzzles closed out our favorites of 2014. Arguably the best puzzle of the year was a giant Fillomino “Dear John” from Grant Fikes that went out to our patrons in April; these votes just cover our web puzzles though.

Tapio Saarinen made a cute Fillomino out of just tiny digits:

Guest contributor Robert Vollmert created a really challenging Checkered Fillomino with some interesting discoveries inside as well:

Closing out the best Region Division puzzles of 2014 were a pair of Cipher Fillomino from Palmer Mebane. Palmer’s not had a lot of interest in puzzle construction over the last couple years, but whenever he returns with new ideas they have been fantastic. Quoting from his email that submitted these two: “This is not really a return; just a couple good ideas that were too good (in my head) to leave undone.” While Tic-Tac-Toe got a lot of Fave votes, the C Major theme earned the most for Region Division puzzles and tied (with the TomTomTom and a puzzle to be named tomorrow) for Puzzle of the Year:

These best puzzles have been gathered in this PDF.

We had 59 loop puzzles in 2014 in several distinct genres.

One of the best Masyu puzzles was this classic “Dominoes” theme from guest contributor Murat Can Tonta:

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Another highly rated Masyu was this Deformable Masyu from Serkan Yürekli:

Three puzzles tied for the most FAVE votes and were separated based on the number of solvers to determine the order of the top 3. With 11 FAVE votes but the most solvers was a Slitherlink (Sheep and Wolves) by Thomas Snyder called “Surrounded!”:

In second, also with 11 FAVE votes, was one of the few puzzles we got from Palmer Mebane this year (almost all of which earned lots of praise). This Yajilin was actually a 2013 submission that we held onto until this year’s April Fool’s week for obvious reasons:

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And the best Loop puzzle of 2014, with 11 FAVE votes but many fewer solvers for a 30+% Fave/Solve ratio is this Castle Wall, also by Palmer Mebane:

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These best puzzles have been gathered in this PDF.

We had 47 Object Placement puzzles (Star Battle and Battleships and other variations) this year.

The best Battleships puzzle was “Solved?” by Bram de Laat where a fleet of seas obeys the outside clues. Definitely one of the most original themes we had this year.

We’ve had a bunch of Pentomino placement puzzles and the highest rated was this Pentomino Minesweeper by Thomas Snyder.

There have been a lot of highly rated Star Battles this year. While it has not yet gotten a lot of solvers since it was posted just two weeks ago, guest contributor Carl Worth’s “Star Duel” has already earned a good number of FAVE votes.

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Not a lot of Monday/Tuesday puzzles got recognized this year with “best” ratings, but Zoltán Horváth’s Pentominoes theme fit the bill. (Full disclosure: Jiří Hrdina independently sent us a puzzle with this same theme earlier without Zoltán knowing. This puzzle was released this year as part of The Art of Puzzles book; Jiří’s Pentomino Star Battle would have probably earned a lot of FAVEs too if it had been on the web and not a book puzzle.)

The Best Object Placement puzzle of 2014 however went to a medium Star Battle with a very visual theme: “Man Made Out of Stars” theme by Thomas Snyder.

These best puzzles have been gathered in this PDF.

Because of the mainstream popularity of Sudoku (née Number Place) and its variations, we’ve kept Sudoku separate from the rest of the Number Placement category historically. But due to this split, both Sudoku and Number Placement are our smallest categories, each with 34 entries this year. Today we are announcing our best Number Placement puzzles of 2014:

TomTom puzzles add some math onto the Latin Square frame familiar from Sudoku, and one of our Toms wrote the best classic TomTom of the year. This “Count-Up” puzzle from Tom Collyer started the year off well:

Skyscrapers is our other major Number Placement genre at the moment. This Sums Skyscraper by Thomas Snyder, “Going Up?”, received a lot of faves. Is there something to puzzles with “up” themes getting highly rated this year?

We’ve only posted one Ripple Effect puzzle on this site, but it was a rare gem from Grant Fikes and very highly rated.

Our two best number placement puzzles were both “new” TomTom variations. John Bulten, a guest contributor to GMPuzzles, came up with a rather original “clueless” TomTom:

In the end, the highest rated Number Placement puzzle (and one of three puzzles that tied for FAVES for Puzzle of the Year) was the TomTomTom by Thomas Snyder, his 200th contribution for the site:

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All of the Best Number Placement puzzles of 2014 are collected in this PDF.

There will be no new puzzles this week as we look back on the last 51 weeks (and 326 puzzle posts) at GMPuzzles. Over the next six days we will be presenting our “Best of 2014″ selections, using data from the FAVE button at the bottom of each post. Because of a variable number of solvers over the year (and even over each week), the selection process included raw FAVE counts, FAVE/solver ratios, and internal discussions when those values brought up ties. Today, we present the BEST SUDOKU:

While we had fewer sudoku than last year due to a wider variety of puzzles, the sudoku we posted still received rather high ranks.

The best Classic sudoku from last year was Flyers by Thomas Snyder (aka Dr. Sudoku), a hand-crafted sudoku where getting just one digit is quite a challenge:

Thermo-Sudoku is a frequent variant here and this “June Sun” puzzle also by Dr. Sudoku was the highest rated standard variant:

This combination of Thermo-Sudoku and Skyscrapers from Hans van Stippent, with zero given numbers, earned a very high ratio of FAVEs from its solvers:

2014 brought a new contributing puzzlemaster to the website, and Prasanna Seshadri’s sudoku contributions frequently rose to the top of the charts. As a new variation, this “Hamle Sudoku” was very highly rated:

Overall, the highest marks went to another puzzle from Prasanna, one that I both rejected and accepted. Originally created for Prasanna’s Sudoku GP round in 2014, this Basement Skyscraper Sudoku puzzle had to be cut from that competition for reasons of time/difficulty and for having a higher emphasis on Skyscrapers (a puzzle genre) and not just Sudoku. Fortunately, this “reject” got a chance to shine on our website as a really elegant puzzle, and our Best Sudoku of 2014:

All of these best sudoku can be found in this PDF.

While all of the last posts had easily defined categories, we did have a few puzzles this past year that went well outside of the box. We wanted to give them some recognition as our Best of 2013 comes to a close.

First, our reward for “Best Puzzle Response” has to go to Craig Kasper for one of his Sunday Surprises. After Grant Fikes posted a Doctor Who-themed “Seek and Spell Sudoku”, Craig put together a quite appropriate and humorous retort from the Daleks. It was certainly one of our more memorable jokes of the year.

“Best Repeat” has to go to Grant’s LITS + Double Back puzzle from July. While it scored ok in each category, that it actually worked as two kinds of puzzle made it something we didn’t mind posting twice. We’ll try to double back on Double Back puzzles later this year.

Finally, “Best Surprise” was clearly won by Dr. Sudoku’s April 1st Word Search puzzle. If you haven’t tried it yet, you really should without any spoilers so we won’t say anything more except our readers thought it was awesome.

2013 was an incredible year for us. Many years ago Wei-Hwa Huang and I came up with a dream to build a daily puzzle site. While we never had the time to get it off the ground then, Grandmaster Puzzles is now a clear destination site for logic puzzle fans around the world. We currently have five regular authors and one more on the way starting tomorrow. In 2014 we hope to have a few more guest authors appear here and there. There will also be a few format changes to make the site more accessible to newcomers, which you’ll notice in the coming weeks. One of the larger ones is that we will have a return to having some focused weeks where a particular puzzle type will be highlighted.

One big change in 2014 is that we will plan to put out regular PDF “Puzzle Packs” for sale every month. Our long awaited “The Art of Puzzles” will actually be released first as five separate puzzle packs currently planned to start at the end of this month, with a Tapa and Nurikabe collection, and then two more in February, and the last two in March. The complete set will then be published as a print-on-demand book for solvers who’d prefer a hard copy. After that we have a few different sudoku and other puzzle packs in the works — some from individual authors and others from a mix of contributors. I don’t know if I can meet my New Year’s Resolution of getting one out each month in 2014, but with more help on the site now we should be able to get close.

I’ll close this post with some solving stats from the first year. We posted 322 puzzles and actually had several solvers complete them all (or come very close). At 99+% completion when we last checked were lukabear, achan1058, muhorka, kiwijam, Projectyl, sknight, sworls, JooMY, and FoxFireX, while migross76, uvo, Alien, and sfcorgi were quite close. These are clearly our top fans for the year! Once we have a nice prize to raffle off we will give something out to at least one of these frequent solvers. We had 30 solvers register solutions to at least 200 puzzles and in total had over 15,000 correct answers this year. (Many visitors just download the puzzles and don’t track their answers on the webpage, but to make our leaderboard you’ll need to submit.)

Our most solved puzzle is surprisingly our very first prescription, Dr. Sudoku Prescribes #1, which had the benefit of lots of direct links in January and has slowly been gaining finishers throughout the year. With so many puzzles now, a lot of solvers have certainly put some of these on their “backlog”. In terms of web traffic, we outgrew our first server set-up by the midyear, but have been stable and on-line consistently since then after a change of hosts/servers. I hope we continue steady growth in 2014 without needing to again rebuild things.

Most important to me, we had 0 broken puzzles for the whole year; every single one had just one solution. Some of the credit for this goes to our authors who are diligent about their submissions, but some thanks must also go to our many test-solvers for double- and triple-checking. There are a few computer-generated puzzle makers that write things like “our automatic process guarantees no broken puzzles” as if this is some unique benefit of their process. Proper development, editing, and testing can be done with more elegant hand-crafted puzzles too. While we might eventually make an error once in a blue moon, our solvers should consider our puzzles quite reliable.

As always, we appreciate your input on what you’d like to see here, and we thank you for your readership over the year.

We started with two loop genres (Slitherlink and Masyu) and added our own take on another (Yajilin) later in the year. But some Snake, Path, and other puzzles came in as well. In this category, variations seemed to get high ratings most consistently, with a surprise favorite among the group.

All for One and One for All, one of our first Slitherlink puzzles with an uncommon center, was the early favorite in this category.

But two Slitherlink variations would end up tied with higher rankings at the end of the year. March brought us Slitherlink (Domino) from Grant Fikes, an entertaining puzzle that gave domino clues and required the loop to be tiled as dominoes (but not necessarily uniquely, which led to much debate).

While there were no wolves in sheep’s clothing in our next favorite, Slitherlink (Sheep/Wolves) from October was also well-received.

Among the Masyu, the most top votes went to Grant’s extra large format puzzle from June (Grant contributed two more large Masyu to The Art of Puzzles which we can’t wait to show you).

But the favorite in the category was a much more recent puzzle, Tapa-like Loop from Serkan Yürekli. Whether this variation has enough steam to become a regular puzzle type remains to be seen, but a lot of solvers enjoyed this one example so we will try to have some more in 2014.

These phenomenal loop puzzles are gathered together in this PDF.

Fillomino and Cave are the two major Region Division styles we have here at GMPuzzles, and 2013 saw 39 puzzles across this space. The favorites here span the calendar year.

Standard Fillominoes formed many of your most favorite puzzles. While it was one of the more recent puzzles, Grant’s 28-dice opus #8 received a good ratio of fave votes to solves.

In July, after Palmer debuted as a contributor here, his seventh puzzle with an Antisymmetric Ones theme received your votes.

And perhaps because of the challenge (our hard puzzles seem to be more favored than our easier ones), Squeeze Play from March also made the final cut.

These two cave puzzles slightly edged out Fillomino at the very top this year though. Almost Perfect 10? from our initial release of Cave puzzles got high marks.

But the Region Division Puzzle with the most votes was this Cave (Product) variation from early April. We’ll certainly see if we can provide more of this Product variety in the future.

You’ll find all these puzzles grouped in this PDF.

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.)