Peter Ritmeester

Peter Ritmeester (1961) began tormenting his schoolmates in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, with homemade riddles and puzzles back in elementary school.

As a student at the University of Amsterdam, Ritmeester competed in marathon board-game contests, studied chess, mastered checkers, battled at bridge, tackled table tennis, pondered puzzles — all while pursuing his studies in historical sciences. “I thought this kind of time management was not helping my future career,” he says. “How wrong I was: I had actually been preparing for it!”

Ritmeester’s path as a puzzlemaster began in 1988, when he landed a job creating board games for Jumbo, a Dutch games manufacturer. A year later, he moved up the global games ladder when a Dutch publishing company hired him as its puzzle editor.

At the first World Puzzle Championship in New York in 1992, Ritmeester became particularly interested in the international potential of puzzles that didn’t rely on knowledge of a specific language to be solved. In 1997, Ritmeester quit his job to start his own puzzle designing company, and in 2000 he started together with Ellen Goudsmit PZZL.com.

In 1998, Ritmeester was appointed general secretary of the World Puzzle Federation, the group that oversees the annual World Puzzle Championship, the puzzle world’s biggest event. He was re-elected three times until resigning voluntarily in 2011.

His puzzles were published worldwide on all continents except Antarctica, including The New York Times and the cover of Games Magazine, the premier publication for puzzle enthusiasts.

Ritmeester is the inventor of both Hyper Sudoku, since 2007 published daily in The International New York Times, and of Sixy Sudoku, first published in The New York Times July 21, 2019. Together with Will Shortz, crossword editor of The New York Times, he made 300+ sudoku books, creating all puzzles for them.