The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[motris]

A couple months ago I ran into the book O'ekaki: Paint By Sudoku which I found to be a very sad renaming of Paint By Number puzzles (also, in some places, Paint It Black, Piccross, Nonograms, ...) that had absolutely nothing to do with sudoku. The puzzles can often have interesting logic and having the solution be a picture seems to make them a popular feature of puzzle magazines. However, this book had nothing at all to do with sudoku.

I decided yesterday, as it was a slow day at work, to try to actually make a variation of a sudoku puzzle that also includes Paint By Number elements, to make a legitimate paint by sudoku puzzle. I admit, just as with my earlier US State Sudoku, that my goal was to write something very different and unique, something that has some esthetic value and, while not necessarily impossible, is a fair but difficult puzzle. Anyway, the puzzle is posted (with a much better description of the rules) on my blog.

Are you ready to Paint By Sudoku!?!?

[Lindy]

Hi Motris

I enjoyed this puzzle. Being a fan of Paint by Number puzzles it was natural for me to start with the coloured elements. The puzzle started off fairly easy, with the given numbers acting as clues for the positioning of the coloured blocks, but I had to bring Sudoku into play to finish the image. If that was by design, then it worked brilliantly as a combination puzzle, rather than two separate puzzles. The sudoku element was challenging, but fortunately (for me) I was able to complete it without advanced techniques. I don't know many of those!

Well done.

Lindy

[motris]

Glad you liked it. I did leave a little bit of the picture unsolvable without the sudoku clues - I would have liked to leave a little more but it was very hard to get this result. Even before I put in any givens, I could solve all but a couple squares, so really the picture and choice of color clues made the PBN part a little too simple. However, I did want to make sure on this first try that people could get to the sudoku part which I found, like you, to be "challenging" but not unfairly so. It will probably be easier for me to try to embed some sudoku-solving + picture-solving interplay in a 9x9 grid (probably with 4 pixels and 5 numbers, unicolor clues) so this may be something I try in the future.

I'm finishing up some examples of a different variation now ("Battleship Sudoku") that has a little bit more of the feel I wanted for this puzzle where you place some ships, solve some of the sudoku, which then lets you place some more ships. I don't know if you regularly do battleship puzzles, but you might enjoy this variation as well once I post it.

[Lindy]

Battleships is an old favourite. I look forward to your variation.

[robert@fm]

British newsagent W.H.Smith used (up to December 2004) to publish and sell a magazine of construct-a-picture-by-numbers puzzles, called Tsunami; but of course they had to drop this suddenly, because in the light of Boxing Day 2004, to continue it would have been tsuicide.

They relaunched it as Hanjie...