Sudoku Xtra issue 1 is only just on sale and I’m already starting work on issue 2!

If you’ve read issue 1 then you’ll know that I’ve proposed a ‘community’ puzzle section at the back, where people get to send in their own puzzles and I will include a selection in a special section.  The idea is to try and build up the kind of puzzle community that some of the Japanese-language publications have, but which we haven’t yet seen in an English-language magazine. Hopefully it will lead to a virtuous spiral, with on the one hand people who contribute puzzles getting a larger audience for their own work whilst similarly on the other hand encouraging more people to read the magazine for the novel puzzles – and hopefully all the while encouraging more feedback too, which will help everyone.

In time for the second issue I’m not realistically expecting very many submissions – after all, it won’t be long before I need to start finalising content for issue 2, and that doesn’t give people much time to buy the magazine, think about puzzles, draw them up and submit them.  So in order to help things get going I’ve approached a few people who regularly create top-quality puzzles of their own and asked them if they’d be happy to contribute a puzzle or two to issue 2.  Therefore I’m very pleased to announce that David Millar of  The Griddle has agreed to provide a couple of his excellent designs for issue 2.  If you take a look at his site you’ll see that he regularly posts a huge variety of different puzzle types, and it will be fantastic to have some of this content to help launch the community section of Sudoku Xtra issue 2.