Multi All things Sudoku

[Jawneh]

Ladies and Mentelgen. You may have heard of such odd game of logic called a Sudoku before. Normally a 9x9 square divided into 9 3x3 squares, in which you have the numbers 1 to 9. But wait! Even if you can fit those numbers in those boxes, they cannot repeat in the box. And not in the same row either? You're telling me not in the same column? People can solve these things?! Okay, you do get some numbers filled in there to start. Phew, that does help.

Yes, they can! And if you're a person who loves logic puzzles with (generally) numbers, sudokus are for you! Solving one can take as little as minutes if you get good at them and learn some neat tricks or as long as hours or days for some... very tricky ones.

I have a sudoku app that just makes random regular sudokus that are generally fairly solvable. Sometimes I run into ones where I make mistakes in its "impossible" difficulty. Even then, I've managed to solve even those in under 10 minutes.

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But why am I here spreading gospel about this game? Well, instead of going to bed an hour and half ago, I decided to try to solve a custom sudoku with a special rule. There were no numbers at all to start with! Only assorted arrows that told that any numbers in that direction had to be lower than the one on the arrow. Insane sounding, right? But with a little logic you can get started and slowly unwind the whole thing and it is very very fulfilling feeling when you manage to solve one of these special ones.

There are many places on the internet that make and host these, but the place I enjoy the most is the good folks on the Cracking the Cryptic YouTube channel. They have their apps, channels, discords, and websites. Most notably, they solve these on a daily basis and usually some very tricky ones. This arrow one I mentioned was from there too. I would say this was hard for my skill level, but there are ones that are insanely hard, but also some that are a lot easier, but thanks to the special rules they are neater and more engaging at times.

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I know there's a certain @Alu who also knows these good folk. I might just start trying to solve some more of theirs to see if I can make my noggin think a bit better.

I'll also drop a link to the sudoku I mentioned. You can find and even try to solve it yourself here: https://sudokupad.app/z01nexs74t

 

[Jawneh]

Just yesterday, I finished a other interesting one. The folks on Cracking the Cryptic have started getting and solving sudokunwith fog of war in it. Kind of nuts eh? The fog moves away only if you guess the correct number in a cell. This is neat as it gives a different kind of solving mechanism as you slowly open up the grid and get more information.

The puzzle I did was like this with "brown dots." Those suckered mean the two cells between them have to be adjacent numbers or have a 2:1 ratio. And that's it. There were no numbers given and you only had the middle 3x3 revealed in the beginning. You had to puzzle out what the numbers were from there. Took a bit over half an hour for me.

 

[Raine]

I think I've solved fewer than 5 Sudoku puzzles in my lifetime, all but one intentionally. The last one was unceremoniously thrust upon me by a video game.

They're amusing little distractions, but generally I don't really have "down time" in a way that's conducive to anything like this. And if it's not down time, I'm definitely messing with something equally, but differently, silly in nature. Like spreadsheets. For fun.

 

[Jawneh]

Fair enough. There are plenty of sudoku that are fast and easy for novices to do as well. Like ones where nearly half the numbers are in and you just got to look around while thing to figure out the rest. Then just... eventually get hooked on them.

Definitely not for everyone. Though if numbers are evil, I've seen some where they replaced the numbers with 9 different colors or 9 different symbols or pictures. Same principal still for a normal sudoku, though that removes at least one trick you can only use with numbers.