I’ve been solving puzzles since the very early 1980s, when my primary source was Dell puzzle magazines. That was a couple of years after Howard Garns created “Number Place” for those same magazines, and a couple of years before puzzle publisher Nikoli imported Number Place to Japan, renaming it to 数独 (literally “number single” but pronounced “Sudoku”), and Sudoku spread around the world from there. In the 1990s, I solved a lot of Sudoku puzzles, including two then-popular variants: Killer Sudoku, and Sudoku-X.
Like many people, I discovered Cracking the Cryptic on YouTube in 2020, as the video of Simon Anthony solving Mitchell Lee’s “Miracle Sudoku” puzzle seemed near-inescapable at the time. It’s still incredibly entertaining to watch! From there I discovered an unofficial Discord server and community that sprouted up—inspired by Cracking the Cryptic—devoted to the popularization of “variant Sudoku.” I even created a few variant Sudoku puzzles of my own, and I mean “a few.” Four around Christmas 2021, one around Christmas 2023, and one in September 2024. Six!
In 2025, I attended the first annual SudokuCon in Boston with around 100 people, mostly members of the Discord server. I met people I’d admired, and people I’ve come to admire since. I was inspired. Since then I’ve created many puzzles with many different rules and constraints. It’s time those puzzles found a home on the open web.
I’m publishing new puzzles on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays, at 16:02 UTC, which is either 8 or 9am Pacific time, depending on whether daylight is being saved or not.
Puzzles by Constraint
Some more difficult puzzles have guided walkthroughs.AI Policy
No AI was used in building this site. I’m no artist, but I created the front page image using a free image editor. I started with a blank “canvas,” and added 15 puzzle grid images into separate layers, then set the opacity for each layer to 20%, then rotated each layer an arbitrary number of degrees until it all looked about right. Then I added a “rounded corners” layer on top of that. Finally, I applied a “glitch effect” available in the editor.