As we start to celebrate 2014, let’s look back at some of the best object placement puzzles from the last year. This genre involves placing things into a grid, usually with specific touching rules driving the bulk of the logic. We had 39 puzzles in this genre last year, and one runaway winner for best puzzle. First, the very good (but not the very best) in the category:

Battleships (Yajilin) was one of Grant’s early contributions here and, with a set of battleship pieces in the grid as Yajilin clues was quite clever and well received. (The doubled battleships aspects of the theme pushed it into the object placement and not loop categories.)

Shipping Lanes from May was also highly rated. This Battleships puzzle was actually one of two created with this title/general theme in 2013; the other was kept for The Art of Puzzles (and if Dr. Sudoku ever gets his act together to publish this you’ll get to see it too!).

Amongst regular-sized Star Battles, Tom’s Throwing Star from September was a recent puzzle with a fair amount of favorite votes (or favourite votes, as he’d have us spell it).

The super-sized Clown from August got a good number of votes too among the Star Battles, over a quarter of the solvers who finished it marked it a favorite which is the best ratio in the category.

But the puzzle with over 50% more votes than any other, the one that certainly went most outside the box in the category, was Grant’s Star Battle (Corrupted Regions). I’m sure you had the same reaction I did to reading the rule “Each region must contain some number of stars other than 2, including possibly no stars at all” — there’s no way that will work. And then it does. It may be a one-off puzzle, but it is the Best Object Placement Puzzle of 2013.

This PDF contains the Best of Object Placement category for 2013.

We had 45 Number Placement puzzles in 2013, mostly Skyscrapers and TomTom puzzles but also other styles like Smashed Sums. While variations did rather well in some of the other categories, our favorite Number Placement puzzles were mostly “classic”.

The one exception was the Even/Odd Skyscrapers from June with only shaded and unshaded cells to get started.

Two other skyscrapers earned a lot of votes as favorites: Mostly Five, from March

and Either/Or from February.

The others that fit this category were TomTom puzzles including Triple Play from June (also one of the hardest puzzles we’ve posted):

and 1/3/13 from our very first week of puzzles.

While some categories have a clear winner, we’d need another voting parameter to actually choose a winner here. Both Either/Or and 1/3/13 are tied at the top. The five “best” puzzles are grouped together in this PDF.

(A PDF of the puzzles from week 52 can be found here.)

There will be no new puzzles this week as we look back on the first 52 weeks (and 322 puzzle posts) at GMPuzzles. Over the next six days we will be presenting our “Best of 2013” selections, using data from the FAVE button at the bottom of each post. Because of a variable number of solvers over the year, the selection process included raw FAVE counts, FAVE/solver ratios, and internal discussions when those values brought up ties. Today, we present the nominees in our toughest category (with 77 entries) of BEST SUDOKU:

Big and Small from April was a Classic Sudoku with an uncommon separation of givens that also affected the logic of the solve.

Start Small from May was a Tile Sudoku that many found to be a good pedagogical example for how to solve this style of puzzle.

Boxed In from January was a Thermo-Sudoku with an interesting visual pattern but no givens. The logical path was highly influenced by the “box” theme and many solvers appreciated the very first required deduction.

It’s Sudoku Time from December was a late nominee but a popular one. This arrow sudoku resembles a clock with just 5 givens (at 12, 3, 6, and 9) to get the solver started.

And, by absolute vote count, the favorite sudoku of 2013 is:
Jekyll and Hyde, a consecutive sudoku from February that merges that genre with non-consecutive puzzles with a half empty/half full kind of theme.

The “Best Sudoku of 2013” are all gathered together in this PDF.

Tomorrow we will announce our best number placement puzzles from 2013.