2023 posting schedule

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Happy New Year!

We’re reaching the end of the 15th 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 weekday 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', in some order.


• 2022 attempted 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 contained the three letters 'two'—except many 4x4 and 5x5 puzzles contained only two of those three letters, not all three. Oh, well.


• 2023 keeps this “year number” theme going, playing off the spelling of the year. Every puzzle word or phrase in the Monday-through-Friday puzzles contains at least three of the four distinct letters in three somewhere in the word. I fully intend to do the same in 2024, using at least three of the four letters in four. We’ll see...

Here’s the weekly 2023 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) 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 prime-size puzzles easy!


• Saturday: A day of bad puns—paraprosdokians. 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. And often, a big groan. 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) I’ll continue the Sunday pun theme of books never written, alternating with Shakespeare insults and contronyms (words with two opposite or contradictory meanings). Each of these three sets of puzzles challenges you to spell out a quote, word or meaning by solving one or more small (4x4 or 6x6) word Sudoku puzzles.
  
  Finally, every other week you’ll also get a 12x12 Hidden Word Sudoku puzzle. Sundays are truly a challenge!

In all, I plan to post about 800 Word Sudoku puzzles in 2023.

I’ve also produced almost three dozen books of Word Sudoku puzzles—more are in the works—that test your Word Sudoku skills while hopefully providing you hours of fun, including many “aha!” moments—or rueful groans.

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 12,600 posts ago—to explore the fun of mixing words and anagrams, as well as letters and logic. I hope you enjoy solving these puzzles as much as I do constructing them. As always, I invite your comments—please let me know what you think using the blog comment feature.

Thanks,
--Dave

All puzzles and text contained in this blog are copyright © 2008-2023, David H. Thompson. All rights reserved. Please tell your puzzle-loving friends to follow this blog. Thank you!