Dr. Sudoku Prescribes #26 – Consecutive Sudoku
Theme: Hashtag Fun? A consecutive sudoku with a large # in the middle.
Rules: Standard Consecutive Sudoku rules.
Answer String: Enter the 5th row from left-to-right, followed by a comma, followed by the 7th row from left-to-right.
Time Standard: Consecutive Sudoku Master = 2:00, Expert = 6:00, Novice = 20:00
Excellent puzzle. All deductions are direct.
~ 8:00
8 mins 12 s ….went wrong once in the middle due to over speeding..
Then erased again fully and then did..I need to maintain a fine balance between flow ,speed and doing correctly which i am not doing..
I wasn’t timing very well, but I think it took me about 5, maybe a bit more. I like how the middle flows and the logic at the bottom.
Been trying to do something with the hashtag – which itself has no solution. How did you manage to find the placement of the other consecutives – with just two solutions?
At first I couldn’t parse this comment. Then I realized you might be trying to make other consecutive puzzles with just these shapes.
Indeed, just the Hashtag has no solutions. I forced the internal shape, and the lack of any connections in a one cell outer ring (rows 2,8, columns 2,8) and then there were a bunch of solutions that add extraneous bars to the far outside. I picked one that seemed to solve well. Making “pretty” consecutive puzzles is very hard and having some flexible tools that allow an “either/or” set of positions to assist my usual process has always been necessary. A lot more could be done visually if the “if and only if” rule was dropped, but that probably makes the solving much less fun.
I’d managed to work out how to do it, but as you say very time consuming to get something reasonable.