The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[djape]

Not sure if anyone has done it before, but yesterday I posted my first ever Samurai "greater/less than" puzzle.

I'm just wondering if there's any interest in these? I think at first sight they look too difficult and people might wonder where to start, but actually they are quite easy once you figure out the logic and basic solving technique(s) behind them.

[motris]

Never seen a samurai greater than/less than before, but as the sort of person who would probably enjoy this challenge I've printed your puzzle out to try this evening. I do find that once you know how to start these, its not too difficult to complete, but I would place them amongst the hardest variants for people to initially get into.

[motris]

Took me an hour and five minutes to solve - while people who have not done enough of these may be a little overwhelmed by all the symbols, I found it quite manageable. I'm actually going to make a note to myself to use one of your corner squares as an example greater than/less than puzzle if I ever need to show someone how to solve one as the two 9x9 ones I have from other sources are either (i) too hard or (ii) broken and I felt your combined set of puzzles was well done and of the right difficulty for the greater than/less than variant type.

(As one other point of reference, the World Sudoku Championships used an 8x8 grid for the greater than/less than puzzle which made it far too easy IMHO.)

I'm not too sure that the samurai format added much to the puzzle though, except for letting you solve (possibly) otherwise unsolvable individual grids by propagating enough digits into the shared corners. I guess this is a critique I have of many samurai puzzles in general, where I feel being able to "oversolve" the middle box without doing more than one of the corners is a big weakness. However, unlike with regular samurai, where this really really bugs me, I found that the isolated puzzles were still a real fun challenge and so I really appreciated the collected set of five grids. Thanks for creating this, its definitely going on my keeper pile.

Thomas Snyder