Wedding Gift #2 by Thomas Snyder
After a week of fun content from the GAS team, I wanted to celebrate a special partner with a Classic Sudoku in a favorite pattern/theme. I’ve made puzzles called (Four-leaf) Clover a lot of times, but this is the first one I leave for Clover.
or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools)
Theme: For 🍃 Clover
Author/Opus: This is the 580th puzzle from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku.
Rules: Standard Sudoku rules.
Difficulty (highlight to view): 4 stars
Time Standards (highlight to view): Grandmaster = 5:30, Master = 9:30, Expert = 19:00
Solution: PDF
Note: Follow this link for other classic Sudoku. If you are new to this puzzle type, here are our easiest Sudoku to get started on. More classic Sudoku puzzles can be found in The Art of Sudoku, The Art of Sudoku 2 and in our beginner-friendly collection Intro to GMPuzzles by Serkan Yürekli.
What a lovely, tricky classic! I only got past the crux of it once Gliperal helped me out a bit. I’m always curious when I solve something like this – to what extent was the logical path planned out from the beginning, and to what extent was it something that just started to emerge from the arrangement of givens (that you then tried to preserve through the rest of the solve)?
I’m very glad you liked it.
I have multiple ways I make classics. When there is a highly scripted/bottlenecked set of steps, I have at least thought about a “seed” I want to use like what happens here, gotten many numbers set along the path, and then may do anything from (1) set all by hand and check at the end it does want I want to (2) mostly computer generation and evaluation (make ~1000 puzzles that use this seed and I check if any of them really feature it at an early step or have a good flow into / out of the seed.
It is a bit more of an art of evaluating the results than doing all the building oneself. It is greatly helped by picking patterns that have lots of flexibility and the four ring / four leaf type patterns with Windoku spaces highly featured are very good.