The quickest way to see what this site is about is to take a look at the two puzzles below. The one on the left is typical -- a random puzzle, indistinguishable from thousands of others available in books, newspapers, and on the web. The one on the right is created by us, an instantly recognizable design providing a distinctive experience that can be easily referred to and remembered.
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You will find here 101 such designs, single-solution puzzles which have been further enriched by the entertaining stories they have inspired. These stories, on fascinating topics of history, art and science, will take you on enjoyable journeys as you rest your mind between periods of mental effort. All the games and articles available on this site with full access come from our book, Sudoku Stories: History, Art and Science in 101 Designer Puzzles which can be purchased on Amazon.com and CreateSpace eStore. Currently, we are able to provide full access to this website only as a free gift to the buyers of that book (see the bottom of this page). Any visitor can enjoy, however, 14 complimentary puzzles, one per each chapter into which the content of the book (and of this website) has been divided. Please note that the Sudoku games we feature can be played on smartphones by visiting our website via mobile devices like Android, iPhone and others.
The 14 complimentary puzzles can be enjoyed immediately on our website or printed for later use on a bus or a train. Keep in mind, however, that your progress in a game will be lost when you leave our page. To preserve your work, and to continue solving your puzzle on any other computer/device on the Internet, consider establishing a free account with us—a process which will take only seconds to complete. With the account created, we will store your progress on every puzzle you have started so you can resume your work whenever you sign in again. Among other benefits, you'll also be able , to share the fact that you have solved a particular puzzle, say, the "Snake of Death" in the "Animals" chapter, and give an opinion on its difficulty.
To grade the difficulty of our designs we have fed them to the publicly available Sudoku Explainer which assigned difficulty scores to each of our grids. While very helpful, and an important, computer-generated indicator of the puzzle’s difficulty, we believe you—the player—are the ultimate judge of the effort needed to solve our grids. Hence we have provided you with an opportunity to give an asterisk-based grade on the experience each design provided you. Sudoku Explainer judged 40% of our puzzles as easy, 20% as medium in difficulty, 20% as difficult, and the remaining 10% as extremely difficult.
Sudoku games like the 101 you will find here can present difficulties in design; one cannot take a full grid satisfying all the game’s conditions, pick the entries that fall on the puzzle’s shape, and erase all others. A puzzle obtained this way will almost certainly have many solutions. It would be unfair to offer a player a puzzle with more than one solution—they could never be sure whether their difficulties with a given cell were due to their faulty logic, or the cell’s allowing two equally valid numbers. It is, therefore, with great pleasure that we present the visitor with the result of our creative and computational work. We hope that our games will provide you with many hours of entertainment and satisfying challenge.