Just released to our e-store is this TomTom collection. Our puzzlemasters Ashish Kumar, JinHoo Ahn, Murat Can Tonta, and Serkan Yürekli have worked together to create 63 incredible hand-crafted challenges. Your mind will need to stretch a lot to solve the 42 classic TomToms, 20 variations (4 each in 5 different styles), and the giant TomTom (Samurai) puzzle that concludes the book. If you enjoy mathematical and logical challenges, this book will be perfect for you.

2021 continues to be a year of transition and growth for GMPuzzles. Having brought Serkan Yürekli on-board as Managing Editor last year, and getting more support from the rest of our team, we’ve had the opportunity this year to focus on several different parts of our publishing business. At the start of the year I set our some objectives and key results for GMPuzzles. While this was just a set of internal targets, I wanted to write today to share our goals with our audience, suggest how we think we are doing, and get your feedback on anything more we need to be doing to meet our objectives.

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Throughout 2021, we are working to have our older catalog of puzzles updated to have digital solving options and to also have solution PDFs everywhere.

On the PDF front, we have recently added another 18 months of solutions to the site and currently have answers for all puzzles posted going backwards to February 2016.

We are also now taking individual puzzle types and putting them all into Penpa-Edit to enable digital solving. The first puzzle style we have completed is Kurotto and all 27 of our prior Kurotto have digital versions with automatic solution checking online. We will eventually “reintroduce” these puzzles with a better set of “How To” videos, a curation of our favorites, and a better web-flow than just blog pages for solvers who want to binge on one of our styles. For now, if you want to try more of this shading puzzle style please click through the Kurotto archives.

Finally, a lot of people have been asking about our solving widget (i.e., FAVE/SOLVE button) that has had login issues for several months due to browser security updates as it was hosted externally. We are nearing completion of an update to host this ourselves, and will share another update here at the end of the month. With the solving tracking, online solving, and other solutions coming together we hope that the solving experience for GMPuzzles in 2021 is greatly improved. Please share your feedback with us on how we can do even better.

Thanks to the great support of Swaroop Guggilam, we have already updated our Penpa-Edit beta to have new solving functionality for Star Battle. In addition to the left click on a cell to place a star, and right click (or right click and drag) to mark X’s, you can now right click on an edge or corner of a cell to place a dot clue. Putting in a star in a cell touching a dot will make the dot go away so your notes clean up after themselves. You may need to clear downloaded files from your browser cache to get the latest version of the solving interface to show up, but we hope you enjoy this improvement as much as we do.

While there was nothing “wrong” with our first solving video for the Pinwheel puzzle, it used some trickier steps than it needed to. So we made a new YouTube video to highlight the new solving interface tool for Star Battle, as well as a simpler path to get around the Pinwheel:

Our plan is to release at least 1 new e-book each month in 2021. Our first release is a really great title: Araf by Serkan Yürekli, with more region division puzzles like we just posted this past week on the site.

This book is a full exploration of Araf from Serkan, with lots of clever puzzles and Aha moments. There are a total of 50 hand-crafted puzzles, including 12 puzzles across three variations and a giant Araf at the end. Check it out now in our e-store.

JinHoo Ahn has shared a lot of great web puzzles this year (some that will likely be very competitive for Best of 2020), so I’m quite excited to announce the release of our first book of puzzles from this talented designer, Star Battle.

This book is a collection of 50 Star Battle puzzles, including 15 variations, that have some very nice visual themes and interesting logic. The difficulty ranges from easy to hard, and includes ten 3-star 15×15 puzzles (two of which are variations) and a massive 6-star 30×30 puzzle to finish. Check it out now in our e-store.

Our solvers have found Pentominous to be a really great region division puzzle, so we are excited to announce the third volume in our e-book series, Plenty O’ Pentominous 3, has just been released on our e-store. Grant Fikes and Murat Can Tonta are back with another incredible set of Pentominous puzzles, including 8 Pentominous (Borders) variations.

If you are new to this puzzle type, here are our easiest Pentominous to get try out.

Sunday is going to be a day when we feature solution videos to our puzzles. Today we’re pleased to have a video for this morning’s Consecutive Pairs Sudoku from Cracking the Cryptic / Simon Anthony.

Also, we have just relaunched a new version of our e-store for our puzzle PDF books, which should be much easier to use with more payment options, cart functionality, search functionality for authors and genres, notifications when PDFs are updated, …. Note that the old accounts / passwords will not work here but we can share prior purchases with you if you need to grab the downloads again.

We’re still doing some visual improvements as many of our books never had covers or online examples. We will likely highlight one old title each week with sample puzzles while we update the catalog.

For the whole month of June, we will have a 20% discount on all titles in the shop (automatically applied at checkout). So this is a great time to catch up on any past collections from GMPuzzles that you may have missed. And please tell us if you run into any issues with the new store.

Dear solvers,

We just added the Plenty o’ Pentominous 2 ebook from Grant Fikes and Murat Can Tonta to our web store. These two fantastic authors have constructed 53 more creative Pentominous puzzles including some new highly original themes. So if you enjoyed their first Pentominous collection (or even, on the other extreme, if you’ve never solved a Pentominous before) you may want to check out this new book.

While I don’t have another update on when GMPuzzles will begin posting web puzzles again, that is in part because of a different, non-puzzle update from me. After almost five years at Verily Life Sciences (formerly Google), most recently as the Head of Computational Biology, I just left that job. I will be returning to Adaptive Biotechnologies as VP/science lead for their immunosequencing diagnostics program in early March. I’ll be splitting time in Seattle and San Francisco for this new role, and it will be the main focus of my time for the next several years. (I’m still hopeful that if I can successfully hand off most GMPuzzles responsibilities to others in the coming months, this should not have too large an effect on this site going forward; thanks again for your patience as I work through this life transition.)

I’m sharing here a message I sent to subscribers by email this weekend, which contains a lot of the emerging vision I have for 2020 and beyond. We’ll be back soon (but with no fixed date in 2020 for this return yet), but I’m excited for what is coming.

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TL;DR: I’m writing to share an update with what should be good news as we will be back sometime in 2020, but with some immediate changes including the end to all subscriptions in their current form.

Dear subscribers,

As mentioned a few months ago, my full-time work in science and my goals for bigger things for GMPuzzles made it unsustainable to continue to do regular web puzzle posting, e-book publication, as well as routine subscriber reward fulfillment. It was not an easy decision to “pause” the site, but the words of encouragement from you — our loyal fans — have helped over November in clarifying our best approach to 2020 and beyond.

A couple common themes that you shared with me were that:

• Many of you subscribed in part to just give back to a site that you loved (that you’d donate if you could and that I shouldn’t bother to send a refund*).
  • *I am still going to send you a refund for any 2020+ prepayments by end of year, as that is what any business should do in this situation.
• The solving videos really helped you better understand the puzzles, author motivations, and tips to solve them. They were one of your favorite rewards.

Across these themes and others was a pretty clear signal that we have the right content (elegant hand-crafted puzzles from our group of authors) but the wrong approach at the moment for this content, particularly the wrong early monetization. The Patreon/subscriber reward type model was a first experiment but one that it is time to end. It makes it harder to do our job each week. A lot of the interactions because of the small scale have not been automated, like adding/subtracting names from the email list. Rewards that need me to reach out 2 or 3 times for a book choice (and I still am bothered when 15% have an unclaimed reward even after many messages). So when subscriptions after a couple years do not bring in too much revenue (and I don’t need the revenue at the moment to keep the site running for many years), I should return to focusing on the core strengths. One of my biggest regrets in going to the subscription model is that it greatly reduced the commenting on the GMPuzzles blog. We never had a technical solution to let you comment early when receiving the puzzles early, so the discussion from those who would print a puzzle out after 9 AM to do that day died away. I think it is important to have “events” to build a community like first releases to everyone at the same time, as well as other time-scale releases (products/books) that aren’t meant to be absorbed in the same way.

Building the puzzle community is the most important thing we should be doing right now. Our solving videos on Youtube are another important channel we’ve not tried to make the main channel. That is where I want to start an active web channel for me and other puzzlemasters who solve our GMPuzzles posts (and possibly outside puzzles like Puzzle Grand Prix puzzles) to discuss the beauty of puzzles as a means to *grow* a community, including a competitive puzzle community. Putting all the videos *behind* the paywall is a mistake I need to undo. I am going to unhide the whole channel very soon. I’ve already shared the full backlog of videos with you a couple weeks ago. I’m sharing it with the world, and going forward it is not a “reward” to learn how to solve a puzzle. It is a route into our community for people of any skill level.

So in 2020 (but not in January), we’re going to return to a predictable web posting schedule. We will add solutions in PDF form to each puzzle after a few days so that we can cut down on the only comments we still routinely get on the site that need moderation — people doubting we have a valid or unique puzzle solution (and we’ve never made an error *yet*). And we’ll probably completely remove the puzzle submission tracker but not the rating/fave system as it takes us extra work to define submissions, add arrows to our otherwise automatically generated art, and triple check we don’t have typos there (where again we have many checks on the puzzles but not the submissions). Keeping the good pieces and making them easier to get to you, with a focus on growing the audience, is the core theme for 2020. And I have a very good candidate (you may be able to guess who) for our Managing Editor position who will come on in January to ensure we have this predictability in all things GMPuzzles when we “unpause”.

As a business, we will still try to generate some revenue, by publishing and selling e-books. Once we get a routine schedule for these books to be published, including regular series we are launching like Grandmaster Puzzles Quarterly, we may turn on subscriptions again to let you receive some of our books at a discount. But we will have a far better technical solution for how to get you that content so that it can actually scale.

For seven years since launching the site, I’ve considered myself the main patron of GMPuzzles. I have put both time and money into seeing the puzzles I like to solve come about more. I’ve appreciated having other patrons take off some of this burden (financially), but the burden in time was actually larger than expected in doing so. So I’m improving the patronage goal by simplifying too. We will add a tip jar to the site. And we will let you choose whether you want to donate to GMPuzzles, to a puzzle author, or to both at some ratio. GMPuzzles is stronger than just me, and you should have a way as we grow the community of puzzle authors alongside the community of puzzle solvers to encourage their art.

While this is a long message, I want to close the mail with a simple message of thanks. For as much as you’ve thanked me for our puzzles, I am as appreciative of the thoughtful comments, patience, and dedication you’ve shown me and the site over the years. I would not find the energy to continue to try to make GMPuzzles a larger thing if not for all of you!

Cheers,
Thomas