A sudoku download that shows you how to get better
This sudoku download is for players who want puzzles that stay interesting after the easy ones stop being a challenge. Sudoku: The Compositor runs on your Windows PC, and instead of an Easy, Medium or Hard label, each grid is graded by the hardest reasoning step it requires.
Before a puzzle reaches you, a built-in solver works through it one deduction at a time. If the solver cannot finish it by logic alone, the grid is thrown away and another is made. What you get is always solvable by thinking, with exactly one answer, and the label tells you honestly what kind of thinking that is.
There are four grades. Plain needs only singles. Job work brings in pointing pairs. Book work asks for naked pairs, hidden pairs and triples. Fine work is where X-Wing, XY-Wing and Swordfish turn up. You can stay at the level that suits you or climb deliberately, knowing what the next step up will ask of you.
Sudoku strategies, taught when a grid first needs them
The story mode puts you in a small print shop as the new apprentice. The forty jobs run through four chapters, and Hollis Crane, who runs the press, introduces each strategy at the moment a puzzle first calls for it. She explains it once, in ordinary language, and moves on.
Eleven techniques are covered in all. These are the names you will see in the game and in most sudoku guides, so what you learn carries over to puzzles anywhere:
- Full house, naked single and hidden single
- Pointing pair and box/line reduction
- Naked pair, hidden pair and naked triple
- X-Wing, XY-Wing and Swordfish
Advanced sudoku techniques without reading a manual
Written explanations of an X-Wing or a Swordfish are hard to follow because they describe a pattern in the abstract. Here the hint does the explaining on the grid in front of you, in three presses of H or the Hint button.
The first press names the technique that is available right now. The second highlights the row, column or box where it applies and says why it works there. The third points at the exact square, selects it, and tells you which digit goes in or which candidate comes out. Stop after the first press if you only want a nudge.
If you have entered a wrong number and nothing can follow, the hint says so instead of sending you in circles. Squares that clash with another digit are marked as you play, so a mistake does not quietly cost you the rest of the puzzle.
Daily sudoku and puzzles of your own
Outside the story, Your own work starts a fresh grid at any of the four grades whenever you like, and the game keeps your best time for each. The Daily job is generated on your PC from the calendar date, so everyone playing gets the same grid. Monday and Tuesday are Plain, and the grade rises through the week until Sunday is Fine work. Finish one each day and the game counts your streak.
