2019 posting schedule

Happy New Year!

If you’ve followed this blog, you know I’ve experimented with annual themes, trying to tie daily puzzles together.

2016 was the year of the vowel—almost all daily puzzles above size 6 used all of AEIOU.

2017 expanded on the idea of including one combination of letters in a bunch of words, using the 3-letter abbreviations for each month (JAN, FEB, MAR, etc.). Almost every weekday Hidden Word Sudoku puzzle contained the three letters of the name of the month when the puzzle posted.

For 2018, I went the opposite way from 2016: Each daily puzzle tried to minimize the number of the five common vowels. You might have noticed: A lot of puzzle words contained ‘y’ as another vowel.

2019 takes that effect another step: Every puzzle word contains ‘y’. Here’s the 2019 posting schedule—the same schedule as the last couple of years, starting out easy on Monday and reaching fiendish by Friday.

• Monday: 4x4 and 6x6 Word Sudoku puzzles
• Tuesday: 9x9 Word Sudoku puzzle
• Wednesday: 8x8 Word Sudoku puzzle
• Thursday: 10x10 Word Sudoku puzzle
• Friday: 5x5 and 7x7 Word Sudoku puzzles
  As you know, Sudoku puzzle sizes are normally not based on primes; the internal box (rectangle or square) have width and length, and the outside dimension of a puzzle is the product of these two integers. Relaxing the requirement that the internal shapes be rectangular boxes removes the restriction.
• Saturday: Swifty Sudoku
  
• Sunday: (The Challenge) ‘Punnish’ Word Sudoku puzzle and, every other week, also a 12x12 Hidden Word Sudoku puzzle

A Swifty Sudoku puzzle spells out a hopefully very bad adverbial pun named after (and loosely based on) the wonderful children’s books about fictional character Tom Swift. The series authors hardly ever used the verb “said” by itself. A Swifty pun takes Tom’s speaking style to the max on the absurd scale, as in:

Parsley, sage, rosemary," said Tom timelessly.”

or

Let's go for another gallop," Tom recanted.

Solve the individual Word Sudoku puzzles and place the circled letters in the corresponding numbered quote grid to spell out the pun. Then groan aloud! A Punnish Word Sudoku puzzle set spells out a more general pun; our theme this year continues the last several year’s “Never die” puns—as in:

Old lumberjacks never die, they just split.”

So in 2019, I’m posting about 500 Word Sudoku puzzles. I started Magic Word Square in mid 2008—more than 9,000 posts ago—to explore the fun of mixing words, letters and logic. I’ve also created nine books of Word Sudoku puzzles—and many more are on the way in 2019—that will test your Word Sudoku skills, while hopefully also providing you hours of fun. Please visit my amazon author page to see my puzzle books: https://www.amazon.com/author/davethompsonapr. The puzzles in the books have not appeared in the blog.

I hope you enjoy solving these puzzles at least as much as I do creating them. As always, I invite your comments—please let me know what you think!

Thanks,
--Dave

All puzzles and text contained in this blog are copyright © 2008-2019, David H. Thompson. All rights reserved. Please tell your puzzle-loving friends to follow this blog. Thank you!