It has been awhile since messages here, but I’m working on a lot of things in life as I rebuild to achieve a larger mission. My jigsaw is slowly being assembled, and I think the last 100 pieces came together when I met 100 new friendly faces at SudokuCon in Boston. People to whom I can tell the truth about Snyder Notation, not “Snyder Notation”. Where I even shared stories of solving a puzzle in a playoff that included Tetsuya Nishio, someone who sometimes thinks as far as his head can with a contradiction before placing a sure number down into the grid. The same way I do. But not at all “Nishio logic”, which has a reputation as guessing in the sudoku community when I won a playoff puzzle that also eliminated Tetsuya Nishio because he never guessed. Sometimes our intuitions are the smartest and fastest ways to do things but they cannot be distilled into rules and that is how both “Nishio chains” and “Snyder notation” and whatever are named after two great sudokumasters and have some of the bits right but not the essence of what their namesakes did or do.

So more experimentation incoming with Sudoku. In new ways a person who paints in Sudoku might tell his autobiography, but also a person who might have a brain like Van Gogh when self-asylumed at those moments of painting too. I also stopped at the MFA for the Roulin family portrait show this week, and the letters from Roulin to Van Gogh’s relatives after his hospitalization for cutting off the ear are the things that stuck with me the most and kept me grounded through an overstimulatory weekend.

I recognize outside the Classic Sudoku that most of the more experimental late 2024 “Twelve Days of Sudoku”/”Ready Layer One” work looks uninterpretable without me; at SudokuCon I was overjoyed to have a first solve of a younger life photo collage puzzle (one of the Motivational Posters) by watching people try and sometimes answering questions and giving light nudges. I also led a group play of an improved Just One Cell Sudoku from that period of my “dangerous” art making and other brainstorming with a storming brain.

This puzzle can be graded on a 0 out of 5 scale, and that is how a group with shared ideas was able to get all the way to the perfect answer by going one point at a time. I hope it shows that there is more than one way to do something interesting with Sudoku, and I don’t have to write down any rules for this puzzle for a viewer of any age, even if I would score the answers from a child and an adult and a SudokuCon member differently.

So to my new friends from SudokuCon, join our Discord (link in a lot of other obvious places) and slowly find my threads if you want to be a part of this conversation. Bring me something interesting with legos, for example, that only an intellectually adult person should see.

Today LinkedIn is launching a new daily game, Zip, which is their third logic game alongside Queens and Tango where we’ve helped design/edit the puzzles. Zip is a path-drawing game with simple rules: draw a path through all cells starting at 1, going up in order, and ending at the highest number. Some puzzles have a fully open grid while others, like this puzzle, include walls to embed different logical and visual themes.

PDF

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools)

Theme: Trail of Logic

Author/Opus: This is the 562nd puzzle from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku.

Rules: Draw a path through all cells in the grid by moving horizontally or vertically between adjacent squares. The path cannot cross itself or cross over any given walls. The path must start at the cell with 1, proceed through the other numbers in ascending order, and end at the cell with the highest value.

See also this example:

Solution: PDF and selected animation.

Note: Follow this link for other Loop/Path puzzles.

Note 2: Comments on the blog are great! For a more interactive discussion, please also consider using our General Blog Puzzle Discussion post on the GMPuzzles Discord.

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.

——

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.

PDF

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools)

Theme: The Lonely One

Author/Opus: This is the 561st puzzle from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku.

Rules: Fill each cell with an X or O so that (A) no vertical or horizontal group of three adjacent cells contains the same symbol in all cells (i.e., no XXX or OOO) and (B) each row and column contains an equal number of each symbol. Cells separated by an equals sign (=) must contain the same symbol. Cells separated by a cross (×) must contain different symbols.

Solution: PDF and selected animation.

Note: Follow this link for other Number Placement puzzles.

Note 2: Comments on the blog are great! For a more interactive discussion, please also consider using our The Thirteen Days of Tango Discussion post on the GMPuzzles Discord.

On 25/01/19 at around 5:50 AM, mars opened the second gate and recovered the “coin”, an identification bracelet, left hidden in a tree where olives and oranges cross near a red hovse.

Alongside the “coin” was this hand-written message: “While our diagnoses may be a part of our identities, they cannot be the sole things that define us. I’ve lived too long in fear of mine, when I should still be inspired by what I can do with brilliant minds around me when I try. Knowing that fear is the mind-killer, I leave behind this bracelet of the past, and I go back to pushing the boulder up the hill. You don’t have to imagine me happy. The boulder feels much lighter this time and I know I can get it higher than ever before. See you at the top.”

———-

Congrats to mars for winning the first Grandmaster Puzzle Hunt (see this post for instructions and some trailheads), and gaining responsibility over this blog for at least the next year. Unfortunately there aren’t many “riches” from running GMPuzzles, so if it turns out mars is / are rational actor(s), and not an unduly sentimental patron of puzzles like former management, most projects like subscriptions will be “paused” due to excessive costs. There may still be some puzzles posted here as bonuses, but for now we expect a bit of a gap as mars assesses things. Let’s all celebrate the end of a challenging month of puzzles and other content that will take awhile to fully understand.

PDF

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools)

Theme: Overlapping Squares

Author/Opus: This is the 560th puzzle from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku.

Rules: Fill each cell with an X or O so that (A) no vertical or horizontal group of three adjacent cells contains the same symbol in all cells (i.e., no XXX or OOO) and (B) each row and column contains an equal number of each symbol. Cells separated by an equals sign (=) must contain the same symbol. Cells separated by a cross (×) must contain different symbols.

Solution: PDF and selected animation.

Note: Follow this link for other Number Placement puzzles.

Note 2: Comments on the blog are great! For a more interactive discussion, please also consider using our The Thirteen Days of Tango Discussion post on the GMPuzzles Discord.

PDF

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools)

Theme: Frame

Author/Opus: This is the 559th puzzle from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku.

Rules: Fill each cell with an X or O so that (A) no vertical or horizontal group of three adjacent cells contains the same symbol in all cells (i.e., no XXX or OOO) and (B) each row and column contains an equal number of each symbol. Cells separated by an equals sign (=) must contain the same symbol. Cells separated by a cross (×) must contain different symbols.

Solution: PDF and selected animation.

Note: Follow this link for other Number Placement puzzles.

Note 2: Comments on the blog are great! For a more interactive discussion, please also consider using our The Thirteen Days of Tango Discussion post on the GMPuzzles Discord.

Today marks the start of the MIT Mystery Hunt, an event I haven’t played in for five years but that I helped run last year since my team won in 2023. That January 2023, after six months at a job that was not going to work out and where other societal changes had me very hypomanic again, I escaped to Pasadena, California to gather thoughts and maybe play remotely. While walking the streets late at night, sensing the homeless problem and my own poor mental health, I wondered again about a particular set of messages I wrote to my ex-girlfriend in the days, week, and month after my mother’s death from cancer.

Considering my life like a Mystery Hunt puzzle, I wondered if James Joyce the fifteenth and ChatGPT21 came together to try to answer this prompt: “A complicated and solitary man, ‘TS’, trained at {schools} in {subjects} who enjoyed {books/authors}, {movies}, …, struggled with {moral/scientific questions}, has just lost his mother ‘suddenly’ to cancer after about a 15-year battle with the disease. During this time, certain aspects of his relationship to his parents and friends had changed but he hadn’t fully processed them. Present three works TS wrote and sent to ‘his X’, an important relationship from his past, to represent his grieving process. The works are in the style of a lost ‘child’ looking for solace, a scientist trying to analyze the unexplainable, and a friend that has contained (perhaps without processing) the events and returned to an individualistic communication style shared by TS and X. Bonus points for sharing the kind of message X might send to TS to help the transition back to normality.”

Now the prompting needs some work, but maybe there are points when people identify a reference I must know because of a particular sentence or word I use a certain way. Maybe the darker parts aren’t original to me, just subconsciously plagiarized and even that would be interesting as my brain is an aggregator far more than a creator but people ascribe me a huge level of intelligence because I sound like I know what a thousand people think. However it went, I did get checked into a hospital that January over Mystery Hunt weekend as I needed to be sleeping, had not brought the proper medication, and also didn’t understand my condition in anything like the ways I think I do now. There’s a lot more to it than this letter exchange, but so much of my last seven years has been reengaging with the emotions of these three letters and the good and bad they reveal about me. My own struggles and successes have advanced a far bit past this most important event in my life in my last 30s, but there is no doubt this is the most important writing for someone studying my life to consider as I still do.

None of you are probably studying Thomas Snyder in that way, so you should probably not read this deeply sad and possibly profound missive. You could start with tmsnyder FAQ or really just go solve some sudoku. But I need these words to be public and I didn’t start this series without knowing today might be an important conclusion to my oversharing.