Sudoku Masterpieces
So my third book (and second with Wei-Hwa) seems to have finally been released. The announced release date, which last week moved back from early July to mid-July, has now been trumped by my receiving an amazon.com shipment indicating the book actually is in seller's hands. Many Barnes and Noble stores are listing it as in stock now too, so search there for it if you have been desperately awaiting it and only shop when surrounded by brick and mortar. I used to make trips to see my books in stores (and possibly autograph some copies randomly), but then realized that even knowing what to look for they can be near impossible to locate with all the ABC sudoku (asymmetric, bland, computer-generated) books on the shelves, often in no real order except "crosswords" are meticulously separated from the "japanese" puzzle books of all sorts.
I'm a bit surprised that the book took this long to appear, given the circumstances surrounding its creation. Last February, I got a great email with the subject line "Books from the Future" from my editor and friend Francis talking about an incredible title from Patrick Berry that would be out later that year. Puzzle Masterpieces is indeed an incredible book, and Sterling Publishing wanted us to make a sudoku-based equivalent to come out shortly afterwards. It wasn't a hard sell to get us excited about the project (and it marked the third of now four occasions in which I've been approached by Sterling to do a book; I've never proactively shopped ideas myself).
Puzzle Masterpieces is a book of crosswords with no standard crossword grids. This is not as hard as it sounds in that the essential feature of a crossword puzzle is a set of clues that give intersecting words in a grid, and having a square grid is at times more a convenience than a necessity as Patrick Berry has proven. All the puzzles are presented in a very beautiful way and many unique challenges are within, but nothing of the sort you can get in any old newspaper on a daily basis. That's not to say some square grids aren't present, as in my favorite type Some Assembly Required, where jigsaw word pieces fit together to make another set of words in rows, just that the focus even then is on having a crossword feel without using the most standard format. To replicate the feel of the book, Wei-Hwa and I would have to distill the feel of sudoku puzzles into many different settings.
To us, a sudoku is a number placement puzzle with (at least) three unique-number constraints on each cell. Without this magical number of constraints, a grid variation doesn't flow as well and all variations that have 2-way or even 1-way constrained cells are inferior designs, like that joke "Pyruko" crap that was given out at the WSC which has twelve 1-way constrained cells forcing at least 8 givens into 1-way constrained cells just to be able to have a unique solution because it is so unevenly constrained. So whatever a Pyruko is - possibly a valid suduko variant - its not a sudoku variant and not a good number placement puzzle. You can certainly say a Latin Square puzzle itself is not a sudoku either. Most Latin Square puzzles add in a third constraint (building height and visible clues as in Skyscrapers, closest letter as in Easy as ABC, arithmetic as in TomTom, ...) to reach a good solving space anyway as two unique-number constraints alone do not leave an interesting enough puzzle. Of course, the World Sudoku Championship in Zilina which occurred while I was writing this book had many things I wouldn't call "sudoku" or "puzzles" and shows not everyone agrees with (or at least has realized the necessity of) our definition.
Sterling wanted us to make this book rather fast, to have another hardcover puzzle book on the shelves by Christmas to pair with Puzzle Masterpieces. The rushed schedule almost turned this into the White Album equivalent for Wei-Hwa and me as we fought over creative issues and especially space when our production schedules got grossly out of phase with each other. I often need to spread my writing over many months given my day job but once I get started I often get excited to write a new idea and then another new idea and so on. I'd written >70-75% of the content for a single author book - matching my schedule to Sterling's deadline in case Wei-Hwa couldn't find any time to write puzzles which was not clear - before I had to apply the brakes and leave some room for Wei-Hwa to finally get started. By then I already had my own vision of the final book and had achieved a lot of truly amazing puzzles and was hesitant to give up so much content for as-yet unseen and unproduced ideas. One worry, I guess, was that his even more rushed content (not 2-3 months anymore, closer to 2-3 weeks) might not end up at the same quality. I took the "Masterpieces" name to heart and would say I was aiming for things like the US Jigsaw Sudoku all the time and in every previously used variant I made the best ever puzzle I'd seen in those styles. With new types the line is not as clear, but I still wanted phenomenal puzzles and a good mix. But my worries were mostly unfounded as Wei-Hwa is a machine and can produce a lot of great puzzle ideas in very short order, although I certainly felt I did not have as much time to edit some of his designs into "Hard" space as opposed to "Very Hard" space as I did for Mutant Sudoku. The end result is ~80+% of my stuff is at the start and ~90+% of his stuff is at the end so that the difficulty sort of progresses in the two halves although the ordering of styles leaves a lot more variation from page to page than our past title.
To fit our page limit, a lot of my content ended up being cut, particularly all "fourth" puzzles in styles I wanted a lot of, and many of the square variations we decided should be less of a focus for this title. I've released a lot of the extra content on this blog over the last year: an extra Arrow Sudoku, an extra isodoku (3D-sudoku), several Extra Region/Windoku, Extra Space Sudoku including my Lost in Translation mini-theme set (I tried for several English/language themes in the book since a follow-up to a great word puzzle book should try to do something of the sort even within a logic puzzle context), an extra Star Sudoku and some Four Square Sudoku . Many were good choices to leave out, as what remains is even better, but looking at some of these puzzles should show you the high standard every puzzle in Masterpieces got from me. The only thing I might have wanted left in (if I'd rewritten the idea I think) was my concept for the first puzzle page, a Warmup 6x6x6 Relay, as one puzzle-based critique from early reviewer Brendan Quigley that I agree with is that the first Double Sudoku puzzles are too hard for a good introduction, but when we went with ordering the book somewhat geometrically and then by difficulty, with no easy square puzzles left for weird shapes to start to evolve from, there was no simple first type.
So we had met the early deadline although it was nowhere near as smooth an experience as Mutant Sudoku had been when we had twice the time and had met to plan the whole book out well before we started writing. And then it was in Sterling's hands and odd things started to happen. The "certainly by April, but possibly by the holiday season in 2009" feel we'd gotten started to slip and it became clear that not only would it not be a holiday title, but that it wouldn't be ready for the World Sudoku Championship at all which was disappointing. We'd been told it would be a hard-cover book and it became a paperback with flaps. This may not affect your experience at all, but it is a huge difference royalty-wise and felt like a collective slap on the face from our publisher after the promises we'd been given. Also, we'd been told to make something that looked like Puzzle Masterpieces with two colors, like black and red, on the inside. So we did. The color scheme changed after all the puzzles were submitted to something else. You'll find at least one section that would make much more sense in red and not in blue. I'm dying, as a puzzle artist, to make a book like Color Sudoku with a full palette available to me. If my color is going to be XXXX, please tell me in advance as I will write themed puzzles that work best in XXXX. So just wear rose-colored glasses when solving I guess. All of this is to say the book did not end up exactly as I pictured it, but we always were in control of the puzzle content and that is indeed where the work earns the Masterpieces name even if some themes no longer look right or the front cover's color scheme, as BEQ put it, is very "drab".
I don't talk a lot here about my future projects (it may not seem this way, but it's true), but the lessons from Sudoku Masterpieces have certainly driven my thinking regarding my next major book-sized project. I simply no longer like the year to 18 months that it takes between submitting content and seeing a finished book. Sterling is exclusive to Barnes and Noble and while this means I get some sales I wouldn't get otherwise, it doesn't get into all bookstores and does not get the shelf space it could to start picking up the casual market I'd want to reach to become very successful. So, while TomTom Puzzles will be released by Sterling in the fall, my next book of puzzles will be self-published in some way and therefore follow only a few months after TomTom Puzzles comes out. I intend to make something like the Nikoli Quarterly magazine, with a true mix of logic puzzle types in various difficulties and sizes, but with many of my own puzzles too (including more sudoku variants/TomTom type puzzles people might want from having solved my past books). Most likely I'll go via a print-on-demand route and sell on Amazon, where people who enjoyed my past titles can find this one via my author page, but I'm considering other options based on potential royalty/cost considerations. While this goal of say a bimonthly or at worst quarterly Nikoli-like book/magazine will eventually welcome puzzles constructed by other people, I'd like to make the first "issue" myself to test the waters and establish some standards. Another long-standing goal has been to start running some regular online competitions myself, and I certainly see taking a ~10-puzzle selection from each issue and running it as an internet competition with winners getting notice in the next issue and a free copy or other swag. It should be a very exciting thing when it arrives. For now, you can enjoy Sudoku Masterpieces. And at least imagine some of the book in red. You'll know where.
I'm a bit surprised that the book took this long to appear, given the circumstances surrounding its creation. Last February, I got a great email with the subject line "Books from the Future" from my editor and friend Francis talking about an incredible title from Patrick Berry that would be out later that year. Puzzle Masterpieces is indeed an incredible book, and Sterling Publishing wanted us to make a sudoku-based equivalent to come out shortly afterwards. It wasn't a hard sell to get us excited about the project (and it marked the third of now four occasions in which I've been approached by Sterling to do a book; I've never proactively shopped ideas myself).
Puzzle Masterpieces is a book of crosswords with no standard crossword grids. This is not as hard as it sounds in that the essential feature of a crossword puzzle is a set of clues that give intersecting words in a grid, and having a square grid is at times more a convenience than a necessity as Patrick Berry has proven. All the puzzles are presented in a very beautiful way and many unique challenges are within, but nothing of the sort you can get in any old newspaper on a daily basis. That's not to say some square grids aren't present, as in my favorite type Some Assembly Required, where jigsaw word pieces fit together to make another set of words in rows, just that the focus even then is on having a crossword feel without using the most standard format. To replicate the feel of the book, Wei-Hwa and I would have to distill the feel of sudoku puzzles into many different settings.
To us, a sudoku is a number placement puzzle with (at least) three unique-number constraints on each cell. Without this magical number of constraints, a grid variation doesn't flow as well and all variations that have 2-way or even 1-way constrained cells are inferior designs, like that joke "Pyruko" crap that was given out at the WSC which has twelve 1-way constrained cells forcing at least 8 givens into 1-way constrained cells just to be able to have a unique solution because it is so unevenly constrained. So whatever a Pyruko is - possibly a valid suduko variant - its not a sudoku variant and not a good number placement puzzle. You can certainly say a Latin Square puzzle itself is not a sudoku either. Most Latin Square puzzles add in a third constraint (building height and visible clues as in Skyscrapers, closest letter as in Easy as ABC, arithmetic as in TomTom, ...) to reach a good solving space anyway as two unique-number constraints alone do not leave an interesting enough puzzle. Of course, the World Sudoku Championship in Zilina which occurred while I was writing this book had many things I wouldn't call "sudoku" or "puzzles" and shows not everyone agrees with (or at least has realized the necessity of) our definition.
Sterling wanted us to make this book rather fast, to have another hardcover puzzle book on the shelves by Christmas to pair with Puzzle Masterpieces. The rushed schedule almost turned this into the White Album equivalent for Wei-Hwa and me as we fought over creative issues and especially space when our production schedules got grossly out of phase with each other. I often need to spread my writing over many months given my day job but once I get started I often get excited to write a new idea and then another new idea and so on. I'd written >70-75% of the content for a single author book - matching my schedule to Sterling's deadline in case Wei-Hwa couldn't find any time to write puzzles which was not clear - before I had to apply the brakes and leave some room for Wei-Hwa to finally get started. By then I already had my own vision of the final book and had achieved a lot of truly amazing puzzles and was hesitant to give up so much content for as-yet unseen and unproduced ideas. One worry, I guess, was that his even more rushed content (not 2-3 months anymore, closer to 2-3 weeks) might not end up at the same quality. I took the "Masterpieces" name to heart and would say I was aiming for things like the US Jigsaw Sudoku all the time and in every previously used variant I made the best ever puzzle I'd seen in those styles. With new types the line is not as clear, but I still wanted phenomenal puzzles and a good mix. But my worries were mostly unfounded as Wei-Hwa is a machine and can produce a lot of great puzzle ideas in very short order, although I certainly felt I did not have as much time to edit some of his designs into "Hard" space as opposed to "Very Hard" space as I did for Mutant Sudoku. The end result is ~80+% of my stuff is at the start and ~90+% of his stuff is at the end so that the difficulty sort of progresses in the two halves although the ordering of styles leaves a lot more variation from page to page than our past title.
To fit our page limit, a lot of my content ended up being cut, particularly all "fourth" puzzles in styles I wanted a lot of, and many of the square variations we decided should be less of a focus for this title. I've released a lot of the extra content on this blog over the last year: an extra Arrow Sudoku, an extra isodoku (3D-sudoku), several Extra Region/Windoku, Extra Space Sudoku including my Lost in Translation mini-theme set (I tried for several English/language themes in the book since a follow-up to a great word puzzle book should try to do something of the sort even within a logic puzzle context), an extra Star Sudoku and some Four Square Sudoku . Many were good choices to leave out, as what remains is even better, but looking at some of these puzzles should show you the high standard every puzzle in Masterpieces got from me. The only thing I might have wanted left in (if I'd rewritten the idea I think) was my concept for the first puzzle page, a Warmup 6x6x6 Relay, as one puzzle-based critique from early reviewer Brendan Quigley that I agree with is that the first Double Sudoku puzzles are too hard for a good introduction, but when we went with ordering the book somewhat geometrically and then by difficulty, with no easy square puzzles left for weird shapes to start to evolve from, there was no simple first type.
So we had met the early deadline although it was nowhere near as smooth an experience as Mutant Sudoku had been when we had twice the time and had met to plan the whole book out well before we started writing. And then it was in Sterling's hands and odd things started to happen. The "certainly by April, but possibly by the holiday season in 2009" feel we'd gotten started to slip and it became clear that not only would it not be a holiday title, but that it wouldn't be ready for the World Sudoku Championship at all which was disappointing. We'd been told it would be a hard-cover book and it became a paperback with flaps. This may not affect your experience at all, but it is a huge difference royalty-wise and felt like a collective slap on the face from our publisher after the promises we'd been given. Also, we'd been told to make something that looked like Puzzle Masterpieces with two colors, like black and red, on the inside. So we did. The color scheme changed after all the puzzles were submitted to something else. You'll find at least one section that would make much more sense in red and not in blue. I'm dying, as a puzzle artist, to make a book like Color Sudoku with a full palette available to me. If my color is going to be XXXX, please tell me in advance as I will write themed puzzles that work best in XXXX. So just wear rose-colored glasses when solving I guess. All of this is to say the book did not end up exactly as I pictured it, but we always were in control of the puzzle content and that is indeed where the work earns the Masterpieces name even if some themes no longer look right or the front cover's color scheme, as BEQ put it, is very "drab".
I don't talk a lot here about my future projects (it may not seem this way, but it's true), but the lessons from Sudoku Masterpieces have certainly driven my thinking regarding my next major book-sized project. I simply no longer like the year to 18 months that it takes between submitting content and seeing a finished book. Sterling is exclusive to Barnes and Noble and while this means I get some sales I wouldn't get otherwise, it doesn't get into all bookstores and does not get the shelf space it could to start picking up the casual market I'd want to reach to become very successful. So, while TomTom Puzzles will be released by Sterling in the fall, my next book of puzzles will be self-published in some way and therefore follow only a few months after TomTom Puzzles comes out. I intend to make something like the Nikoli Quarterly magazine, with a true mix of logic puzzle types in various difficulties and sizes, but with many of my own puzzles too (including more sudoku variants/TomTom type puzzles people might want from having solved my past books). Most likely I'll go via a print-on-demand route and sell on Amazon, where people who enjoyed my past titles can find this one via my author page, but I'm considering other options based on potential royalty/cost considerations. While this goal of say a bimonthly or at worst quarterly Nikoli-like book/magazine will eventually welcome puzzles constructed by other people, I'd like to make the first "issue" myself to test the waters and establish some standards. Another long-standing goal has been to start running some regular online competitions myself, and I certainly see taking a ~10-puzzle selection from each issue and running it as an internet competition with winners getting notice in the next issue and a free copy or other swag. It should be a very exciting thing when it arrives. For now, you can enjoy Sudoku Masterpieces. And at least imagine some of the book in red. You'll know where.