2020 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.
• 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 took that effect another step: Every puzzle word contained 'y’.
• 2020 plays off the spelling of this year—every puzzle word or phrase in the Monday-through-Friday puzzles of length 6 or more contains the three letters 'twe', spread out somewhere in the word; words of length 4 or 5 contain at least two of those three letters.

Here’s the weekly 2020 posting schedule, starting easy on each Monday and reaching fiendish by  Friday.

• Monday: 4x4 and 6x6 Hidden Word Sudoku puzzles
• Tuesday: 9x9 Hidden Word Sudoku puzzle
• Wednesday: 8x8 Hidden Word Sudoku puzzle
• Thursday: 10x10 Hidden Word Sudoku puzzle
• Friday: 5x5 and 7x7 Hidden 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 this restriction. But that doesn't make the prime-size puzzles easy!
• Saturday: Swifty Sudoku
  
• Sunday: (The Challenge) A series of puzzles that spell out a quote 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!

The last couple of years, the Sunday "quotable Sudoku" puzzle has been a punnish Word Sudoku puzzle spelling out a “never die” pun. (Think: "Old lumberjacks never die, they just split.”) This year, Sunday quotable Sudoku puzzles will alternately explore three themes:

• Change
• Happiness
• Kindness. The quotes about kindness come from people who have submitted their own definitions of kindness to the Random Acts of Kindness website https://www.randomactsofkindness.org/, which is a great place to learn about kindness, as well as World Kindness Day (Friday Nov. 29), Random Acts of Kindness Day (RAK Day, Sunday Feb. 16), and RAK Week (Monday Feb. 17—Friday Feb. 21). I'll have more to say Feb.16.
  

In all, I’m posting about 700 Word Sudoku puzzles in 2020.

I’ve also created 15 books of Word Sudoku puzzles—and many more are on the way in 2020—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 started Magic Word Square in mid 2008—almost 10,200 posts ago—to explore the fun of mixing words, anagrams, letters and logic. I hope you enjoy solving these puzzles 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 © 2008-2020, David H. Thompson. All rights reserved. Please tell your puzzle-loving friends to follow this blog. Thank you!