If you’re not sure of the rules, or haven’t seen one of these puzzles before, then check out the example puzzle I posted last week.

I’ve recently launched a new series of ‘101 Giant Sudoku’ books, to cater for those who like their Sudoku to be considerably larger than normal!

You can see the entire series at PuzzleBooks.org (scroll to the bottom) or visit Amazon and search for “101 giant sudoku”.

There are currently 12 books in the series: 14×14, 15×15, 16×16, 18×18, 20×20, 21×21, 22×22, 24×24, 25×25, 28×28, 30×30 and 36×36.

The larger puzzles work just as you’d expected, so in Sudoku 36×36, for example, you must place 0-9 and A-Z into every one of the 36 rows, 36 columns and 36 6×6 boxes!

These puzzles are designed so they don’t need any advanced logic – just scan the rows and columns and boxes to see what’s missing and what can fit where.

All of the puzzles are designed with attractive 8-way symmetry patterns.

Issue 9 of my Sudoku Xtra magazine is now available for either download as a PDF, or pre-printed from Amazon.com (US) or Lulu.com (elsewhere). With an incredible 127 logic and number puzzles across over 50 types of puzzles, this month’s issue features a giant cover PivotPix picture logic puzzle (also known as Sym-a-Pix and Spiral Galaxies).

This issue has the biggest Community Puzzles section yet, with some truly astonishing puzzles contributed by the cream of the world’s puzzle authors. From Colorlink to a Hanjie-Nurikabe cross-over, and from Symmetric Heyawake to Lying Sum Sudoku, there’s something for everyone.

The rest of the magazine as always has some new variants and rearranged content in, including the interesting Killer Sudoku 1 3 5 7 9 -2 -4 -6 -8 (guaranteed to challenge even the best Killer solvers), Odd-Pairs S and more. With greater variety than any other puzzle publication, including a huge range of Sudoku variants, Sudoku Xtra really is incredible value.

Available from the Sudoku Xtra site now!

Sudoku Xtra

Issue 7 of Sudoku Xtra contains even more large-page Japanese puzzle fun, with an incredible 116 varied logic and number puzzles. A special section in this issue is devoted to giant puzzles, with the 13 full-page puzzles including Hanjie, Nurikabe, Yajilin, Slitherlink, Hashi, Samurai Sudoku variants, Kakuro and more.

Sudoku Xtra offers greater variety than any other puzzle publication, with a huge range of Sudoku variants that include Jigsaw, Extra Region, Skyscraper, Consecutive and many more. Other featured puzzles include Calcudoku, Futoshiki, Hitori, Killer Sudoku and a range of variants, including Zero Killer Sudoku Inequality!

Designed to print on either A4 or Letter paper, or pre-printed on similarly large paper, Sudoku Xtra features puzzles at a range of difficulties, so is suitable for both logic puzzle fans and casual solvers alike. No matter what you like, you’re sure to find many puzzles to enjoy in Sudoku Xtra issue 7.

There’s also another great Puzzle Community section too, thanks to the generous contributors. Puzzles sent in for issue 7 include Navigrid, Mini Killer Sudoku, Knighted Sum Sudoku, Fillomino and more.

Get Sudoku Xtra 7 now.

It’s packed with a frankly ridiculous 133 separate puzzles. The range of content includes:

• Light-up / Akari
• A large cover Nurikabe puzzle
• -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 Killer Sudoku – back by popular demand!
• A third Jigsaw 6×6 Variety Pack of miniature variants
• An extra-big Yajilin
• Killer Inequality Sudoku – lots of symbols on a grid!
• Dominoes - first time back since issue 1
• Plus all of the regular puzzles, from Skyscraper to Samurais to Calcudoku to Hashi to Hanjie to Kakuro and so on…

There’s a bumper-packed Puzzle Community section too, thanks to the generous contributors. Just look at some of the types that are in issue 6: 

• Yin Yang Sudoku
• Sudoku Minus (a trickier version of Sudoku Times!)
• Hexagon 25
• Klump
• Modula
• and more!

So if you’d like a copy (and if not, why not?! ) then just pick one of these links:

Download and self-print *  Lulu *  Amazon.com

Have fun!

Issue 4 of Sudoku Xtra magazine is now with us!  I really think I might be putting too many puzzles into it, because typing up the list of content just knocked me out with how much is crammed into its 52 large-format pages!  Is too much possible?  I don’t know, but look at this enormous list:

128 puzzles in total, including several seriously giant ones.  Brand new for this issue:

• Samurai Star Killer Sudoku Pro
• Number Link Samurai
• Odd Pair Sudoku
• Samurai Odd Pair Sudoku
• Sudoku Inequality Jigsaw
• Jigsaw Sudoku 6×6 Variety Pack (including toroidal, inequality, X, consecutive and killer)
• Killer Sudoku Pro Jigsaw
• Sudoku 15×15 and Sudoku 18×18
• Killer Sudoku 15×15
• Odd & Even Pair Sudoku
• Killer Sudoku Prime

Regulars from issue 3:

• Hanjie
• Masyu
• Calcudoku (three times as many as in previous issues!)
• Slitherlink
• Consecutive Sudoku
• Hitori
• Samurai Star
• Samurai Star Jigsaw
• Number Link
• Jigsaw Sudoku 8×8, 9×9 and 10×10
• Toroidal Sudoku and Toroidal Inequality
• Kakuro
• Futoshiki
• Killer Sudoku
• Skyscraper
• Skyscraper Sudoku
• Samurai Sudoku
• SSSS: Skyscraper Samurai Star Sudoku
• Sudoku Inequality
• Sudoku Extra Regions
• Jigsaw Sudoku Extra Regions
• Killer Sudoku Jigsaw
• SOS: Samurai Outside Sudoku
• Outside Sudoku
• Sudoku 8×8
• Sudoku 12×12 and 16×16
• Samurai Extra Regions
• Yajilin
• Nurikabe

Adding to that already exhausting list still further are the community puzzles: 

• Heyawake
• King’s Journey (also known as Hidato[TM], Numbrix[TM] and many other names)
• Mosaic (Minesweeper picture puzzle)
• As Easy as ABC
• Knight’s Tour
• Shapely Skyscraper
• Isolate
• Klump

And all of this for just £3.99 or $5.99 – it really is fantastic value!

If you’d like to get hold of it just pop on over to the Sudoku Xtra website!

I’ve had lots of requests for a book like this over the past couple of years, so I hope if you’re one of the people who’ve wanted something like this that the book meets your expectations!  All of the puzzles have nice symmetry, and the difficulty level is set such that you won’t need to make lots of fiddly pencil marks in the grid (or indeed any pencil marks at all, if you don’t want to).

It’s printed on large paper (A4 at Lulu, 8″x10″ at Amazon), with just one puzzle per page, so you’re getting the puzzles at a comfortable size for solving. Full solutions are included, and with 50 puzzles it’s going to take you a long time to solve them all!

Please feel free to post any comments here, or head over to Sudoku Xtra and take a browse on the discussion forums – and maybe join in!

This issue is packed full of all sorts of puzzles, including SOS (Samurai Outside Sudoku!), Toroidal Inequalities and many more.  Community puzzles include picture puzzle Mosaic from Clarity Media, and some fantastic Slitherlink-Masyu cross-over puzzles called Shotgun Slitherlink from David Millar of The Griddle.  There’s also some brilliant Klump and Navigrid puzzles from Vexus Puzzle Design.

With 121 puzzles it will almost certainly take you far more than the month until issue 4 to complete, so you’d better get hold of it as soon as possible!

Pre-printed versions will be available in the next couple of days, but you can download and print it yourself immediately!

I’m very pleased to announce that as of 24 hours ago Sudoku Xtra issue 2 is available for download or ordering in printed form.

It contains a staggering 121 puzzles, with only just a few of each type so there is a huge range of variety. At just £2.95/$4.95 it really is great value, but if you’re still not sure take a look at the sample part of issue 1 still available on the Sudoku Xtra site.

New puzzles for this issue include some crazy Sudoku variants, such as Samurai Killer Calcudoku Inequality, and a whole load of novel community-supplied puzzles, including Puzzle L and Knight’s Tour.

With so many different puzzles you’re sure to find not just one but lots of puzzles you’ll enjoy, so check out Sudoku Xtra today!

If you’ve read issue 1 then you’ll know that I’ve proposed a ‘community’ puzzle section at the back, where people get to send in their own puzzles and I will include a selection in a special section.  The idea is to try and build up the kind of puzzle community that some of the Japanese-language publications have, but which we haven’t yet seen in an English-language magazine. Hopefully it will lead to a virtuous spiral, with on the one hand people who contribute puzzles getting a larger audience for their own work whilst similarly on the other hand encouraging more people to read the magazine for the novel puzzles – and hopefully all the while encouraging more feedback too, which will help everyone.

In time for the second issue I’m not realistically expecting very many submissions – after all, it won’t be long before I need to start finalising content for issue 2, and that doesn’t give people much time to buy the magazine, think about puzzles, draw them up and submit them.  So in order to help things get going I’ve approached a few people who regularly create top-quality puzzles of their own and asked them if they’d be happy to contribute a puzzle or two to issue 2.  Therefore I’m very pleased to announce that David Millar of  The Griddle has agreed to provide a couple of his excellent designs for issue 2.  If you take a look at his site you’ll see that he regularly posts a huge variety of different puzzle types, and it will be fantastic to have some of this content to help launch the community section of Sudoku Xtra issue 2.

As mentioned yesterday, the most exciting feature (other than being able to view and buy and read about the magazine!) is the new discussion forum.  It’s a pity Sudoku Pro never had one, because the old BBC MindGames one (which incidentally featured a large number of my puzzles too) was always great.  It would be brilliant if we could make the Sudoku Xtra forums just as good! Here’s hoping…

If you’ve got issue 1 (or even if you haven’t!) please feel free to let people know about it – building up a readership is of course an important part of launching a new magazine, particularly one that won’t be on shop shelves any time soon!

I’m still working on adding content to the main Sudoku Xtra site, which of course it was more important to get up and running at all in the first place rather than waiting until it was ‘finished’ to launch, and so today’s big addition is a discussion forum!

Please feel free to continue posting here about Sudoku Xtra if you would prefer, but if there’s anything you’d like to open up for discussion – or just want to chat about a particular puzzle (or even ask for help solving one!) – then the forums are probably the best place to do it.

You don’t need to register on the Sudoku Xtra site in order to post to the forums, but if you don’t you’ll be asked to type in one of those anti-spam image things each time you post – but I’ve made sure they’re very legible, so conversely fingers-crossed there won’t be any nasty problems with spam! (You should see just how much gets caught in the anti-spam message filters for this site alone – it’s quite astonishing!)

Thanks again!

Sudoku Xtra discussion forums

I’ll also be adding more content to sudokuxtra.com over the coming week, including a discussion forum.

The magazine is 44 pages long, each page 8 inches by 10 inches (20cm by 25cm), and with exactly 100 puzzles in. It prints really well on both A4 and Letter paper, either 1-up (one page per sheet) or 2-up (two pages per sheet) as you prefer. There is a small preview on the Lulu site if you’d like to see what you’re getting (or read back through previous posts here too!). If you order the printed Lulu version you will actually get some extra blank pages at the back to make it up to their minimum page count for an A4 publication, so ignore the page count on the Lulu description.

Click here for a printed copy of the magazine: Sudoku Xtra issue 1 on Lulu

I haven’t yet set up the subscriber ordering site (it will be at SudokuXtra.com hopefully within 24 hours), but if you want to get in right away you can click directly on the Paypal buttons below, and then I will email you a PDF version of the magazine within 24 hours. Once the website is up and running you’ll receive the magazine immediately, so this is just temporary for the next day or two.

If you’re in the US or Canada and want a printed copy you have three choices: wait for it to appear on Amazon in a week or more (you might want to do this to get free delivery as part of a larger order), order from Lulu using the link above, or (for the 8″ x 10″ Amazon.com version but without the option of free postage) order a printed copy of Sudoku Xtra from CreateSpace.com instead, who supply the printed copies for Amazon (in fact they’re owned by Amazon too).

However the best option of all for me – the one where I get most money from the sale – is to order a download version and print it yourself. You can print either the whole magazine or just the pages you choose. If you’d like to do this you also have the option to subscribe for a year (12 issues) for the price of 11 issues, if you’re keen! This also insures you against any price rises that might happen in the coming year. Just click one of the four Paypal purchase buttons below.

Note that when buying on Paypal you can click the ‘Continue’ link next to “Don’t have a Paypal account?” to pay directly with a credit card – you don’t need to create a Paypal account if you don’t already have one. The checkout process will say ‘PuzzleMix.com’, which is another of my sites.

Or for a 12-issue subscription:

Sudoku Xtra – The Magazine for Japanese Puzzle Fans

Today someone commented on my blog here about how Sudoku Pro subscribers who get in touch about their magazines are being told that Accolade Puzzles Ltd, the publisher, is no more, so I thought I should comment.

As a freelance puzzle author I get commissioned by a wide range of different publishers, and I don’t work (and never have worked) for Accolade Puzzles, the publishers of Sudoku Pro magazine, so I don’t know any of the gory details. What I do know is that sadly Accolade Puzzles have ceased trading and entered formal insolvency. I also see today that all mention of them is gone from their parent site, Accolade Publishing, and that the Total Puzzles brand site which covered all of their magazines now redirects visitors to the appointed insolvency practitioners

This is very sad news for me, because I always thought of Sudoku Pro as ‘my’ magazine – I wrote literally all of the content for it, from the front cover to the back cover, and not just that but all the little things too such as the puzzles instructions, hints and tips for the puzzle of the month and so on.  Every 4 weeks I sent all of the content off to the publisher and I always enjoyed receiving the magazine in the post, and trying out many of my puzzles anew.

It wasn’t marketing hype when the magazine claimed that the puzzles were hand-made – every single puzzle in the magazine was either entirely hand-made or had a significant manual component. None of it was churned out of an off-the-shelf Sudoku generator, unlike (it will hardly surprise you to know) just about every other Sudoku magazine you can buy. (My top tip for Sudoku puzzles is only to buy content with a named author on it!)  If you’re going to play puzzles created with a free generator someone found on the internet, you may as well print them yourself rather than pay someone else for the privilege. Sudoku Pro was never like that, and indeed the final issues had very few regular Sudoku puzzles in them at all – the majority were variants or other Japanese puzzles.

The final issue, number 50, was available digitally online, so for those who didn’t receive a printed copy you could try checking at the digital version site, if you had it bookmarked (I didn’t, so I can’t tell you what the URL was).  I’m afraid I’ve no idea if any printed copies were ever sent out, but I have a PDF I downloaded from the subscriber’s website just last week so I have a copy of issue 50 myself at least. I’d also sent all of the content for issue 51.

I suppose if the magazine was to end then issue 50 was a good number to reach. Of course I suppose it’s always possible that someone will buy up the assets and continue publishing the magazines, but I have literally no idea how likely that is. I thought their titles were way above the average puzzle mush on the market, and they certainly didn’t deserve to go under.

But this now leaves me with a big magazine gap in my life, and so on to my new project: Sudoku Xtra.

I’ve decided to start publishing a monthly puzzle magazine myself, initially along the lines of Sudoku Pro but then hopefully branching out to a wider range of logic and number puzzle content, and with even more variety.  I’m also hoping to encourage other puzzle authors to contribute.  The magazine won’t be essentially just a UK publication like Sudoku Pro but will be available worldwide for download from a website which  I’m in the process of setting up, and also in a printed version from Amazon.com. The printed version will cost $9.99, to cover the on-demand printing cost, but the download version will most likely be just $4.99. In UK pounds that’s about £2.99, which is pretty much what Sudoku Pro cost. It will be formatted in large page format, at 8″ x 10″, so Amazon-delivered copies will be much larger than book size, and it will  nicely fill the page size for both worldwide (A4) and US (Letter) printers.  If it is successful enough then I will also make it available for order in printed form from Amazon.co.uk and many other sites (an up-front cost I am avoiding until I know I can cover it!). At least to start with it will be entirely black and white, so anyone can print it without trouble.

If you’re a puzzle author and would like to contribute, please get in touch. Initially any money made will go to cover costs so I can’t offer any payment for content other than a free PDF copy, but hopefully I’ll be able to grow the magazine both in terms of readership and content and it will be a worthwhile thing to contribute to and indeed receive. And then going forward, who knows?

Also if this is something you’d be interested in buying then please post here too with any comments, including what sort of puzzles you’d like to see and how many puzzles you’d expect in the magazine (Sudoku Pro had 67 puzzles, plus the four brain workouts on the back page). I am assuming that a monthly (12 issues/year) format would be best, although without any distributor schedule to keep to this could be flexible and shift around slightly.

Perhaps the (probable) end of one magazine can also signal the beginning of something new?

My new book is out now – The Little Book of Hard-as-Nails Sudoku 5, from Michael O’Mara. It’s available from Amazon UK (link on the right) and, as they say, all other good book stores! (For now, it’s UK only, although importers have listed it on Amazon.com already). It’s part of the Little Book of Sudoku series, thus the number 5 on the cover (although confusingly it’s actually the 6th Little Book of Sudoku, since there was one by another author with the prefix ‘Quick’).

It has 201 puzzles of ever-increasing difficulty, starting at tricky and progressing to insanely hard. They’re broken down into 5 levels, each requiring additional solving skills, but within each level they also get tougher as you progress. Although the puzzles really do get very difficult, they never require ‘unfair’ logic or obscure solving techniques that you’d be unlikely to come up with just on your own. Take a look at my previous posting on hard sudoku for an example – although they get harder than this in the book!