Before breakfast, I do a Killer Sudoku to get my brain working while I have a mug of instant to get my bowels working. There’s a certain amount of tension involved in getting the timing right.
I sneer at ordinary civilian Sudoku. A kids’ game. Wordle? Boring, undemanding, too much guesswork. Go to sudoku dot com, click “killer” in top menu bar, then “expert” in the difficulty menu. Keep an eye on the percentage of players who completed the puzzle. Keep clicking that bar until you see something in the mid fifties or higher. If you choose a level that’s too easy (and let’s not be modest, you’re pretty sharp) you’ll find the whole thing a waste of time. The challenge is the thing. There’s a beautiful logic to it, and you’ll feel stupidly proud of yourself for solving one. The games all play out like this:
1 Impossible. Can’t see anything. Pfft.
2 Oh wait …
3 Agonising mid-game slog
4 Orgasmic release as the numbers fall rapidly into place like dominoes, or something.
The 45 Rule is all over this, often in hidden combinations, and you need to understand the significance if innies and outies. You might need the help of sudokusolver dot com/play/killer/combinations/ but most puzzles can be completed without it.
You can check in, but you can ever leave.
Killer Sudoku is one of my favourites, though it’s Kakuro that I really like. It has a similar theme where combinations of numbers are needed to equal the target number.
Have you tried Wordiply? Most days all you have to do is add an “s”, though you have to pay attention cos that’s not always the case. On those days my tip is to go through the alphabet trying different letters at the end of the word (what we call the “starter word”), then if that fails try them at the beginning of the word. It can sometimes lead you to disccover a “rare short word”. Which is an occasion for both joy and excitement.
Eh? Sorry, Gar – I blacked out just after “Wordiply?”
Ah, you’d probably be a bit rubbish at it then, if you don’t mind my saying so. “Blacking out won’t add an S” as the old saying goes.
Well that’s 31.9 minutes I’ll never get back…aced it though. I particularly like the Second Chance facility, which seems to be forgiving unto infinity.
Do you use a 4H pencil, as I do, to lightly inscribe a square with its known number possibilities as the solving progresses, only to triumphantly erase your faint markings when you figure out and pencil in the final 2B answer?
Who are you asking? If me, the answer is yes.
I did this until I found out there’s an equivalent feature on my computer which does the trick – no more screen damage!
Number games are not something I have tried. I don’t think I’d be any good. I had a much older colleague at work who did Sudoku in the daily paper and I amused myself by every now and then by looking over his shoulder and instantly suggesting a random number between 1 and 9. He would usually explain to me at some length why my suggestion wouldn’t work. He never got my joke and this made me do it all the more.
Yes, I like Killer Sudoku. Plain vanilla 9X9s just don’t do it any more.
I’m not sure this is a thing to advertise, but I got to a national Sudoku final some years ago and did reasonably well. As a puzzle it plays to my strengths in numeracy and being a visual learner.
In the days when The Independent was still a printed publication, they used to have a 16X16 in the Saturday paper, and that was a proper treat. I still dig those out for any long flights, as they’re a perfect time-consuming distraction.
That would be Super Sudoku. I had one of The Independent books that they produced but my Mum “borrowed” it once upon a visit and it was only after her sad passing earlier this year that I was able to get my mitts on it again. Only just started working my way through it but it doesn’t seem as difficult as I remember when it was in the Saturday paper. Current favourites are from the The Puzzlers “Killer Sudoku” monthly publication. The fiendish ones are pretty tough.
Somewhere along the line I had a book with 25X25s. That just stopped being fun.
There’s a YouTube channel entitled Cracking The Cryptic which features hand-crafted variant Sudoku problems, together with a link to a web-app to play along. Here’s an infamous example from a few years ago:
Yes. Another singularity emulating, time-thieving, rabbit-hole Yoochoob channel or what?
My mum, well into her eighties, loved Sudoku. With a flourish she would announce “Done it!”. Took us several years to realise she was merely inserting random numbers wherever. Ah, Alzheimer’s….
The gift that never stops taking
That’s pretty much what I was doing with my first go at Killer Sudoku. Got there in the end though.
Thank you for the link to the Killer Sudoku site. I will have a go. I, too, try and do a puzzle every day, in my case just to see if my brain is still working ok’ish. My favourite is Calcudoku from the Brain Bashers site https://www.brainbashers.com/calcudoku.asp I always go for the 7×7 Hard (there’s a joke in there somewhere, I think!). However, I can’t do it online. I always have to print it out and complete it in pencil and ink, circling the squares I’ve solved to make it easier to see where I am. It did take a while to get used to doing them as I didn’t read the ‘rules’ initiially, especially the bit about it being possible for cages to contain the same numeral, as long as they weren’t in the same row or column.
The site has a myriad of other puzzles, some interesting (eg, Futoshiki and Daily Neighbours) and some baffling and beyond me. Whatever, this is one of the sites where contributions are occasionally sought. As with Wikipedia and The AW, I am always happy to dig out my card and cough up something when asked just for the sheer pleasure they bring.
How are you on innies and outies?
Had to look that up on Wikipedia. I pretty much understand what it’s saying. Interesting… and I will dive in on a puzzle in the morning and have a go. Thanks.
Basically, an innie (single cell encroaching into in any otherwise integral square, row, column) will be the number needed to total that group to 45, and an outie the number over 45. Sometimes there can be more than one square, row or column forming a group of 90 (or over). Likewise, two or more innie/outies will total the number needed to +/-, so you can pencil in possibles – eg. two innies or (not and) outies totalling the 4 needed to make the 45 will be either 3 or 1 each. I’m going to have a little lie down now.
[Nods head wisely like (P)Rick in The Young Ones whenever Alexei Sayle’s character spoke to him… i.e. a dim, confused look]. That said, I do understand what you are saying.
For those not following too easily – or losing the will to live – here’s Wikipedia’s partial explanation: “A further technique can be derived from the knowledge that the numbers in all houses (rows, columns and nonets) add up to 45. By adding up the cages and single numbers in a particular house, the user can deduce the result of a single cell. If the cell calculated is within the house itself, it is referred to as an ‘innie’; conversely if the cell is outside it, it is called an ‘outie’. Even if this is not possible, advanced players may find it useful to derive the sum of two or three cells, then use other elimination techniques”.
So once again, thanks for suggesting something else to keep the grey matter ticking over. I can now also cheerfully waste yet more time in the mornings instead of getting on with the chores. Now where’s my stubby pencil?
That Killer Sudoku looks remarkably like a simpler game called KenKen.
I like regular Sudoku. I have the Daily Telegraph books and can usually get the Diabolical ones but hardly ever the Extreme ones. It’s something to do with Jellyfish that I’ve never quite got. Or maybe some other technique. There’s umpteen YT videos, I quite like Sudoku Swami.
I hesitated to say this for fear of drawing scorn on my head, but so do I. I play it on my phone all the time – very relaxing, particularly on long-haul flights. The hours just fly by.
Cripes. Long-haul flights. Cripes.
On flights, I tend to go with “Really Bad Chess” which works offline. This is where the pieces are random and usually allocated heavily in your favour. You are playing a computer with the capability of Deep Blue but if you have 4 Queens and the computer has only has one Queen (for example) – it can be beaten. It’s not as easy as it sounds.
Also, a stalemate or a draw situation counts as a loss.
All you need is a noisy child kicking the back of your seat to complete this vision of hell, right?
Honestly, it’s relaxing. The hours whizz by. I’m usually listening to something as well.
And I would hope numbed to your surroundings by copious refills of G&T. The thought of taking a long-haul flight gives me hives.
Mike Thep’s the man to talk to about flight, though. He explained how Leonardo da Vinci’s helicopter was never going to get off the ground. To Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo da Vinci translates as Leonard from Vinci in English.
Not in business class matey. We tell them to go outside and play.