2022 posting schedule

from GDJ via Pixabay,com

Happy New Year!

We’re reaching the end of the 14th year of this daily word puzzle blog. For years now, I’ve experimented with annual themes, trying to tie daily puzzles together. This year’s posts will continue that effort.

• 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’ used as another vowel.



• 2019 took that effect another step: Every puzzle word contained 'y’.



• 2020 played off the spelling of the year itself. Every puzzle word or phrase in the Monday-through-Friday puzzles of length 6 or more contained the three letters 'twe', spread out in the word; words of length 4 or 5 contained at least two of those three letters.



• 2021 took the same approach as 2020, playing off the spelling of the year itself, but with even more success. Every puzzle word or phrase in the Monday-through-Friday puzzles contained the three letters 'one', spread out in the word.



• 2022 attempts the same approach as 2021, playing off the spelling of the year itself, but with less success in the 4x4 and 5x5 puzzles. Every puzzle word or phrase in the Monday-through-Friday puzzles contains the three letters 'two', spread out in the word—except for many 4x4 and 5x5 puzzles. Many puzzles of these sizes contain only two of those three letters, not all three. Oh, well.

Here’s the weekly 2022 posting schedule, starting out easy on each Monday and reaching fiendish by the following 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) has 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 prime-size puzzles easy!


• Saturday: For the first time in 10 years, I’m replacing the Swifty Sudoku play on adverbial puns with something new: A Paraprosdokian Sudoku puzzle set. A paraprosdokian is wordplay where the latter part of a statement forces you to reinterpret the first part. The phrase intentionally leads you in one direction—misleads you into thinking one way—and then abruptly changes direction, ending with the unexpected twist. Because paraprosdokians come in two parts, I present each part as a separate quote, each revealed by solving its own set of word Sudoku puzzles.


• Sunday: (The Challenge) Every Sunday, I’ll provide you a Punnish Sudoku puzzle set. The first half of the year will continue with last year's "Books Never Written" theme; the second half of the year will have you spelling out a complete story in five words—flash fiction. I'm about to publish a book full of "Books Never Written" puzzles; I'll publish a flash-fiction collection of puzzles around June. (All puzzles in both books will be different from what's in this blog.) And yet another series of Sunday blog puzzles will alternate with a 12x12 Hidden Word Sudoku puzzle; this third series spells out a palindrome—a statement that reads the same backward or forward

In all, I’m posting about 700 Word Sudoku puzzles in 2022.

I’ve also produced more than 30 books of Word Sudoku puzzles—more are planned for 2022—that  test your Word Sudoku skills while hopefully 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 2008—more than 11,500 posts ago—to explore the fun of mixing words and 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 using the blog comment feature.

Thanks,
--Dave

from MAKY_OREL via Pixabay.com

All puzzles and text contained in this blog are copyright © 2008-2022, David H. Thompson. All rights reserved. Please tell your puzzle-loving friends to follow this blog. Thank you!