This video will talk about our early history with GAS team, where we reached 50 published posts on Saturday, a great milestone for us. On the 51st puzzle (shown) something much different happened when I decided to start solving. What is it, and how do I express / unlock creativity at different times?

Join us every day around 8:45 AM PT to learn about yesterday’s puzzles on the site, other sudoku news, and get a teaser for the new puzzle.

To hate a thing, you have to love a thing. To hate a thing, you have to love a thing. That sounds like yesterday’s theme. This video is not about repetitive computer-generated slop, but it is about repetition. Rather accidental or purposeful, there is sometimes replication of puzzles when authoring or editing. Listen to a fun story that makes us ask how certain things happen and then even forces to ask, when we are choosing a grid like a 17-given one that must be repetition if there is still a way to represent it that is something new and not just déjà vu.

We’ll also reveal the first 2 minutes of the most important Snyder Sudoku Method of construction that we don’t think anyone has done.

Join us again tomorrow around 8:45 AM PT every day to learn about yesterday’s puzzles on the site, other sudoku news, and get a teaser for the new puzzle.

To hate a thing, you have to love a thing. Keep this in mind as you watch this raw video that may venture into delicate spaces but gets at what is important not just about puzzles, but about puzzle publishing, and there is a lot of scar tissue from long before the AI-hype cycle. Based on actions during the video, we suspect at least 98.4375% of slop may eventually be harmed by this video.

Join us again tomorrow around 8:45 AM PT every day to learn about yesterday’s puzzles on the site, other sudoku news, and get a teaser for the new puzzle.

Welcome to the second episode of Today in Sudoku, where we’ll talk about challenges in notation and (BREAKING NEWS!) reveal a new kind of Snyder Notation for outside the box thinking.

Join us again tomorrow around 8:45 AM PT to learn about yesterday’s puzzle more, get other sudoku news, and get a teaser for the new puzzle.

We’re premiering a new Daily YouTube video series (Today in Sudoku) to help explain our Sudoku content, highlight other projects and news, and we’re going to release it daily around 8:45 AM so it can include a teaser for the upcoming puzzle and be a place we gather before solving that. Today it is ok if no one is here and watching on time. We are starting to do things, and find the roles we need to hire, so we can have “The Most Important Sudoku” every day at one place at one time, which is what a daily puzzle needs to have to be most valuable as a daily puzzle. The audience will be here eventually. We already have the best Genuinely Approachable (Variant) Sudoku and we are moving towards the same for Classics.

This does not replace “This Month in Sudoku” which is for longer themes and when we let Thomas have unscripted sections to say more big picture summaries and connect dots where people haven’t seen things. We are still planning the exact date for the second episode of that.

We wanted to share a “the story so far” kind of update for “A Story of Self-setting Sudoku” since a lot of people have not been following very deeply. Importantly, if you just like solving really elegant Sudoku puzzles, please just solve the Sudoku. You can ignore the author, title, and flavor text; the provided difficulties suggest what you’ll be getting on any post. However, the posts do link together so…

For the light summary (web view only):
In the first week, Thomas shared a set of 4 (of 5) puzzles on a box-like grid, titled “Intelligence is Thinking * The Box” which each had very different solving structures. The flavor text suggested some may have been hand-set but by the end he was possibly enjoying time at the beach and a computer was doing most of the work. While getting to full self-setting AI was problematic, adding in new training sources besides just Classic Sudoku got some more curious puzzles and better AI. Finally, on Monday, the “Dr. Sudoku” system launched on its own, exceeding the typical 9×9 space of a sudoku puzzle.

We’ve been told that each week (roughly) there will be a new theme for the Sudoku, and this is now the second day for an apparent “self-driving” theme. The puzzles seem easier so far — at least today’s only needs 1-6 placed — but who knows what is down the road.

For the heavy summary (web and discord rabbithole):
Besides the story above, the president of GMPuzzles, mars, has been using their own HAL 12000 AI system to analyze and solve the puzzles. They have been finding occasional traces of puzzle hunt-like signals in the sudoku, and with the help of Tane, HAL was able to hack into the Dr. Sudoku system but has since gone quiet.

We await further word, but this might be a battle of intelligence against intelligence. We’ll need help eventually. There is a spoiler-free place in the Discord just for the HAL 12000 messages and a cooperative discussion space. But first you may have to join.

We have a few site updates for the start of July, which marks the start of our second full month in the Twelve Months of Sudoku!?! project. A playful YouTube recap of the first month of sudoku is in this video that shares the goal to see “how far we can push the limits of sudoku”:

The big news in June was starting to publish the Genuinely Approachable Sudoku (GAS) puzzle here, a series we love as a great daily game and expect you already love or will come to love in the same way. Having met our soft-launch goals, in July we are making this next update: The daily GAS will be available each day here at 12 AM PT for everyone in the world to build into their routine however they choose. This is the same time as some of our other daily games that we make for LinkedIn and my own daily routine will be to spend a little time double-checking the Queens, Zip, and Tango before solving ~1 GAS puzzle to track my thinking that morning and try to come up with one new idea, even if I just leave it on paper that day.

We don’t yet have our own book/app project with the GAS team; if you want to support clover! (Patreon), Philip Newman (Patreon), and Bill Murphy (Patreon) individually you can go to the pages linked here. One thing you can get by becoming a patron is some of the more GMPuzzles-like difficulties harder than GAS, still with impressive grid construction as you’ll have seen from the regular GAS.

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The other news for July is the start of my “A Story of Self-setting Sudoku“. For a few months I’ve had an idea for a new way to share puzzles that might change the experience a bit. Some may remember the challenging mix of themes in the “Twelve Days of Sudoku” / “Ready Layer One” era (perhaps month 0 of this project?), which had a mix of puzzle types and modes and essays and conversations on mental health and a lot more. I was first pushing that creativity while in a productive, creative state and then later while in a severe hypomanic state, and without the usual team support to keep on target.

This new project aims to reach the interesting and enjoyable potential of that winter project, with more controlled construction and puzzle release. It will still be experimental, and may give off puzzle hunt or ARG vibes alongside other things, but it’s “Layer One” is just a daily puzzle with a little flavor here on the blog and is only much more if you choose to visit our Discord and watch and/or participate with the items that pop up there.

There are three things “A Story of Self-setting Sudoku” is about. First, it is a story. Each puzzle fits into some of the preceding or following puzzles, with a few sentences of text connecting some dots (no more than can fit on a puzzle PDF page). The series is launching with a theme of self-setting (while some AI may be harmed in the making of this series, it is up to you to determine if any were ever used); this may change the conversation from “How did (you/the constructor) make that?” to “Why did (you/the editor) find that important?” and other things too. It will have a daily Sudoku puzzle with difficulty and solving times behind spoiler tags. If you just want a daily Sudoku-like thing more Classic than the GAS, for now this series is my answer. Later in the year, there are other projects brewing that are not “art projects” and are meant for the mass-market that we will point you to instead if the GAS or “A Story of Self-setting Sudoku” are not what you are looking for. There are possibly Easter eggs, and Discord-specific elements (a lot of the extra story/interaction has to happen on Discord).

As always, there are lots of ways to reach me / our team, from blog comments to Discord messages to email or mail. For a little while, I am not going to be posting messages here or on Discord (except automated puzzle posts) and will leave it to mars and their AI solver to try to understand what “A Story of Self-setting Sudoku” is really about. Feel free to read that story, or try to outsmart the AI solver if you can. I’ve left some messages sealed in envelopes for when certain events happen which will be reported here or on the Discord. Enjoy the rest of July!

TL;DR: Our goal to step into more things in Sudoku means working with some of the important new voices in Sudoku. Starting today, Grandmaster Puzzles is partnering with the Genuinely Approachable Sudoku (GAS) team to publish their daily puzzle on this site, helping to gain more visibility and a wider audience for this great sudoku series, and setting the stage for more joint projects in the future to showcase the art of sudoku. I’m quite excited to welcome Clover, Philip, Bill, and their puzzles to our community!

Long form: Over the last year, the GMPuzzles team has become involved in making daily games for other partners, primarily easier logic games that still demonstrate all the potential of hand-crafted design. These games have become a part of the daily routine for a large audience including casual solvers who have never experienced a lot of puzzle types before. However, we haven’t been able to have regular content on this blog because of the time it takes to create and edit these puzzle projects.

Still, the focus on daily puzzles sparks a question: “Thomas, if you had to choose a puzzle to do every day, not from GMPuzzles, what would it be?” Here I have an immediate answer: Genuinely Approachable Sudoku.

Whatever you think of the pandemic-era Sudoku boom, that made Sudoku streaming and very difficult stunt puzzles more common, that made “Snyder notation” a terminology even if not applied like I did to win three world titles, the “second boom” didn’t change much about the way I think about Sudoku or why I love certain puzzles. That is because it takes a lot more than passion alone, or computer tooling and assisted generation that make publishing easier, to achieve a great puzzle. Almost anyone can mash a subset of a hundred variation ideas together in random ways and have something “new”, but the steps to make a masterpiece are harder. It takes human creativity matched with editing feedback and the instinct to think like the solver, to make a puzzle beautiful in all the ways a puzzle can be when you were first getting into puzzles, and not only making the next puzzle for yourself which is crazy hard and misses the audience.

I’ll admit that I haven’t tracked the dozens of individual authors that have popped up since 2020 very much. And no solver has shared a Sudoku from Logic Masters Deutschland with me because they found it super cool and thought I should see it. So a lot of the pandemic boom has just passed me by, much as the 2005 Sudoku boom probably passed all of Japan by because nothing “new” came out of it for the Japanese nanpure/Sudoku audience.

But I have been watching out for the first effort that set out and achieved an interesting and important goal: making an easy sudoku variation every day that can get more people into solving Sudoku of all kinds. That takes a lot more than basic puzzle making to pull off.

The Genuinely Approachable Sudoku (GAS) project was started by Clover four years ago today (June 7, 2021). Since week two it has comprised a group of three authors/editors/superstars working together, originally Clover, Philip Newman and Sam Cappleman-Lynes; since late 2022, Bill Murphy has replaced Sam. Every day they have made an approachable puzzle that may help a new/unfamiliar variation make sense to an audience that hasn’t seen it before, or they may bring something fresh to a regular style whether it is the solver’s first or one hundredth solve. They have created an on-going series and a devoted audience, and recently they added me to those ranks.

I was curious to learn how the GAS team gained their “editing” prowess, since that usually takes outside / experienced voices. I won’t reveal their approach, but I was able to work with some of the team at SudokuCon both in writing puzzles and running events. I usually have a lot of comments when first working with a puzzle author; that I had “no notes” for Clover’s Just One Cell puzzles which have posted here on the blog over the last few weeks is one sign of my respect for these next-generation authors. They have found a way to do something similar in spirit but different in execution to my own goals for GMPuzzles.

GAS chooses variations I love, and also chooses variations I wouldn’t touch (sometimes for good reasons and sometimes where I have judged too soon the value of a rule set and should look again). They usually do it with elegant “Just One Cell”-like simple break-ins that are unique to the individual puzzles and add to the fun as Ahas that confirm you understand the rules and designer intent.

While GMPuzzles will be posting the puzzles here, GMP is not going to add our own editorial decisions/processes unless asked. We want the full breadth of GAS ideas to come in for awhile as is, exposing our audience and me to some new ideas. I’ll be solving every day alongside you to see what pops up, sharing my blind solve times and steps in SudokuPad and sometimes my comments. Some days I will be slow (solving online in SudokuPad without Snyder notation is hard but I’ll try to get used to it, maybe by making new notations that are possible there). Other days I might solve faster than you expect because I’m in the author’s head as they are constructing something I’ve thought about before. For sure, we don’t know all the ways we’ll be able to support each other across Sudoku projects yet, but this collaboration should let us do more things for the good of Sudoku.

I wanted to share a quick note to this community that I am a speaker at the first (to my knowledge) sudoku convention, SudokuCon, to be held in the Boston area early in April.

I will be contributing to two sessions:

Just One Cell Sudoku on Friday the 4th at 2 PM:
Like chess puzzles compared to full games of chess, Just One Cell Sudoku are short, bite-sized snacks of Sudoku logic where each grid has just one cell where a logical placement can be made. The “winning move” can be anything from a basic single to a more advanced chain of logical steps that finally unlocks the answer. We’ve created a playful set of these puzzles as a contest for everyone to enjoy.

and also
How to Solve Sudoku Like a World Champion closing out Saturday the 5th from 5:30-7 PM:
Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku, won three world sudoku championships (’07, ’08, ’11) in the early years of the Sudoku craze. Come hear stories from many years of competing, including what different sudoku championships entail, how to identify your strengths and weaknesses in solving sudoku, and ultimately train to get faster at solving under pressure. From tales of catching a sudoku cheater to the origins of Snyder’s own solving notation, this talk will take you deep inside the world of speed-solving and how top competitors think.

See more info including the full schedule at sudokucon.com. While I’m not as connected with the sudoku streamer community organizing the convention as you might expect, I look forward to meeting old friends and making some new ones in Boston.

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In terms of other site news, we’re still working hard on some external projects that will launch later this year, and we also hope to get back to releasing a few GMPuzzles collections of unreleased puzzles in ebook form in 2025 too. So keep occasionally checking here for news on what we are doing!

After twelve years and over three thousand puzzles worth of free entertainment, the GMPuzzles team has made the hard decision to bring the “blog era” of this site to a close. Despite many attempts through the years, we have not been able to make either the community or the business model work in a blog format to unlock the best from our puzzles. There might still be some posts here from time to time with bonus puzzles, and we intend to maintain this website indefinitely given the incredible library of puzzles here. But there should be no expectation of new “daily content” again in the future.

For 2025, GMPuzzles will focus on several of our partner projects bringing daily puzzles to hundreds of thousands of solvers on other platforms. We will also explore alternate ways to package our content for new audiences. In future years, we might find ways to radically redesign this website and launch a new puzzle platform, but our current ambitions are mostly to be the world’s best puzzle designers and to publish through other platforms where they work for our goals.

While our founder, Thomas Snyder, found an unusual way to say goodbye, he hopes the spirit of beautiful puzzles and pushing the limits of sudoku and other puzzle construction continue in those who were drawn to the site. Thomas will be starting a new place for his own blogging, and we the team echo his thoughts that it has been a great 12 years and we’re still excited for the future of Grandmaster Puzzles in whatever shape that takes.

Thanks to all who have been fans, and we hope you run into our puzzles again in the future.