Our tenth Smashing the Sudoku video, finishing our original 60+1 puzzle reposting series is now live:

We’re still working on setting up an initial version for a GMPuzzles subscription/release model leveraging Discord. If you are interested in being a tester and committing to adding comments/sharing feedback, please let me us know at ads@gmpuzzles.com. We will likely have an email option to share the content to subscribers as well, but right now we are looking for testers to tell us if a Discord integration (as an early version of a more fully fledged platform) is worth committing more time to.

Our eighth Smashing the Sudoku video for “Fleet Week” is now live:

We have two more weeks in this look back series and then we will be putting our attention to a new subscription model for daily puzzles starting in April. While we have a long-term goal of having a full digital platform to deliver puzzles, we will get started by using Discord to support a Penpa + PDF delivery of two puzzles per day. Discord should also allow for a more dynamic conversation ability between our constructors and our audience while we gather feedback on features for the future.

Look to this Sunday update space for more details on our Discord invites and on how to get an early subscription before our April launch.

Our seventh Smashing the Sudoku video (which also announces the prizes for our Ten-Year Anniversary Contest) is now live:

This coming week will be “fleet week” of sorts, with Battleships and Battleship Sudoku alternating every other day.

We’re excited to announce that Grandmaster Puzzles will be organizing the puzzles for the next World Sudoku and Puzzle Championships. This news is now confirmed yesterday following a successful vote of the general assembly of the World Puzzle Federation. The next WSPC event will be held October 15-22 in Toronto, Canada. Thomas Snyder and Serkan Yürekli will be coordinating the puzzles, with a much larger team from Canada and the US working together on all the other details.

Organizing the world championships will be a big project for us in 2023, and we are considering how “competitions” and “rankings” can be a larger theme for our new content on the website and YouTube this year. Please keep on the watch for more news and updates, and do reach out to us if you are interested in contributing to the WSPC (particularly North American authors).

In addition to this exciting news, we have our posted our sixth episode in our Smashing the Sudoku series, looking back at our launch puzzle set from 2013:

I’ve been doing some traveling so am a bit late in announcing the release of our fifth episode of Smashing the Sudoku, as we look back at the good (and evil?) sides of puzzle styles like Consecutive Sudoku and Masyu.

We’ve also now completed adding hints and solutions to the four Microsoft Puzzlehunt puzzles we’ve put here over recent Sundays. If you haven’t checked out these puzzles yet please find them alongside a few other “puzzle hunt” puzzles on our blog.

Several members of the GMPuzzles family are from Turkey, and our thoughts go out to them and to others from Turkey and Syria who may have been affected or may know those affected by the recent earthquakes on the Turkish/Syrian border.

GMPuzzles will be donating all proceeds from book sales for the next ten days to relief efforts like those of the Turkish Red Crescent; we will also match any donations that come in via PayPal over the same period (see Tip Jar in left menu). As an advance against those amounts, we’ve given $1,000 to https://ahbap.org/disasters-turkey.

Update 12 Feb 2023: Serkan has constructed a puzzle to help raise awareness and funding for those impacted by the earthquake. We’ve put together this simplified PDF to be able to play along with the puzzle.

The puzzle was also featured on Cracking the Cryptic:

with this link to play the puzzle online.

We’ve just published our fourth episode of Smashing the Sudoku as we look back at our first puzzles from ten years ago and try to bring back memories of these constructions from our first 60+1 puzzles:

In a few minutes we will also have our fourth Microsoft Puzzle Hunt bonus puzzle, which we hope you all enjoy.