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.

We’ll be posting Sudoku from our 2022 Sudoku Grand Prix Round over the next couple weeks.

Our ninth Smashing the Sudoku video including Slitherlink and Deficit/Surplus Sudoku walkthroughs and an update on the Ten-Year Anniversary Contest is now posted:

This coming week will be the last in our look back series on our first 60+1 puzzles and we will then share more details on what is coming up in 2023 for GMPuzzles.

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.

After a tough January with assorted things like a power outage impacting our ability to compete on the United States Puzzle Championship, and many more events around my science work leading to a mental health break, we’re back on track for most of our 2023 projects. For Grandmaster Puzzles, we’ve now completed our recent “Best Of” series is now finished and we just released our third edition of “Smashing the Sudoku” to go along with our original 60+1 puzzle set.

Coming in the future will be some invites to puzzle contributors and top fans for our Discord channel where we are brainstorming what is next for the site (in 2023 and out to 2033 in a ten year plan), a new approach to web content, and more info on puzzle championships that GMPuzzles will be involved in.

Our last category for the Best of 2022 posts is “Loop / Path” puzzles, where we had 59 posts during the year. All of the best puzzles are gathered in this PDF file.

Our first puzzle to earn best of ratings is a Slitherlink (Liar) puzzle by Thomas Snyder with a Bull’s-Eye theme. This puzzle hit the mark with its solvers by highlighting several different uses of the “lying” clues during the solve.

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools; use tab to switch between edgex mode where left click+drag draws lines and right click marks X’s, and a shading and number entry mode to mark/update the liar clues.)

Next up on the favorites list was an Equality puzzle by Murat Can Tonta, a loop variation featured in our Loop Variety Collection 2. This Equality puzzle has several different quadrants to work through and very interesting logic.

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools; use tab to shift between the default linex mode where left click+drag draws lines and right click marks X’s and a shading mode to help mark cells.)

Two Castle Wall puzzles earned top marks in 2022 but neither was “typical” in that they only used black clues. The first was a “Black Box” Castle Wall puzzle by JinHoo Ahn, another masterpiece from this talented puzzle designer.

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools in linex mode where left click+drag draws lines and right click marks X’s)

Second best in category was another uncommon variation, this time an “unequal lengths” variation that we had seen in other loop styles but that shone through in this Slitherlink (Unequal Lengths) puzzle by Murat Can Tonta.

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools in edgex mode where left click+drag draws lines and right click marks X’s)

The best loop and best overall puzzle of 2022 was this Castle Wall gem that also uses just black clues in an interesting layout to reveal the one forced solution by an interesting logical path.

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools in linex mode where left click+drag draws lines and right click marks X’s)

What did you think of these “best of 2022” puzzles? Add your comments to the posts and send your thanks to the authors for these great constructions.