SudokuSolver Forum

I found the site puzzlemadness.co.uk and it offers a fair amount of a variety of Sudoku puzzles. However, the difficulty:hard Killer Sudoku puzzles on both 16 and 18 June 2023 were, for me, quite challenging (but I did solve them). Is it possible that I am missing some technique that would make them more readily solvable? Yes, I know that the squares, rows, and columns need to add to 45 and that multiples of them need to add up to 45x as well.

Welcome groston!

It does appear there are techniques you are missing since those puzzles get a SudokuSolver score of 0.85, which is very, very low compared to our normal fare on this forum.

My suggestion is to download SudokuSolver and let it show you how to solve those puzzles. Please read that thread also to make the best use of that software. Especially, use and save the "Scoring" techniques list to step through the puzzle. That way, the score and what techniques are being used will match up.

Here are the stats on those two puzzles. You can use the code to paste into the software above. Feel free to post here with the many questions you will undoubtedly have as you learn!!

The 18 June puzzle has some nice big cages!



Cheers
Ed

Thank you. Not sure if I will install the program, but I will go through the lists of techniques and hopefully learn.

In addition to what Ed has posted I suggest you look at the Killer Techniques part of this forum, which has diagrams explaining them. Also in the Archive, try looking at posted walkthroughs for the very early, mostly somewhat easier Assassins in Part A of the archive.

Basic things for you to look out for are Killer Pairs, where two cages in a row, column or nonet must have, for example, 4 and 6 so no other cells in that area can have that number. Also hidden single when a number only remains in one cell of a row, column or nonet.

If you can learn the possible combinations for 2 and 3 cell cages that's very helpful.