How to Create Jigsaw Sudoku Puzzles in Puzzle Maker Pro

Summary: This walkthrough takes you from an empty Jigsaw Sudoku screen to a folder of print-ready puzzle and answer-key pages. You will choose a grid size, a difficulty and a region-layout style, style or colour the regions, add a title that fills itself in, and export the whole run in one pass.

Overview

Jigsaw Sudoku generates complete puzzle pages: a sudoku grid whose square boxes are replaced by interlocking irregular regions — six of them on a 6×6 board, nine on a 9×9 — plus the matching answer key. Every board gets its own freshly generated region layout, is checked to have exactly one solution, and is confirmed solvable by human technique at the difficulty you asked for, so no page you export needs proofreading. Every level generates in well under a second, so a book-length batch finishes while you make coffee — and on Productivity, one Time Saver run produces an entire graded book without you touching the settings between levels.

If you want the solver’s side of it first, read How Jigsaw Sudoku Puzzles Work.

Required Modules

Jigsaw Sudoku — the module itself. A free demo covers every current module, so you can try the workflow before buying.

Standard makes the puzzle and exports the static formats (JPG, PNG, SVG and print PDF), and includes Instant Puzzle Books — a book PDF assembled straight from your current page settings. Creative adds full design control over the board, content variation — letters, colours or your own pictures in place of the digits — Puzzle Book Studio Creative (one puzzle collection, full book editing) and Puzzle Slides, an interactive PowerPoint deck of your puzzles. Productivity adds Time Saver for batch runs and Puzzle Book Studio Productivity, which combines several collections into one book. Creative + Interactive and Productivity + Interactive add online play. You can move up to a higher edition later, so start with the one that fits what you are making today — see Puzzle Maker Pro Editions Explained.

Commercial rights: Standard and Creative both carry the licence to sell the finished puzzle products you make — books, worksheets and printable packs — to your own readers and customers, including KDP, Etsy and Teachers Pay Teachers. Productivity adds the right to sell or supply the puzzles themselves to other publishers and sellers.

Preparation

The generator builds each region layout and each board from scratch, so there is no word list, image list or source file to assemble first — open the module and you can generate. Decide two things up front: the page size you are publishing at, which you set on the Layout tab’s puzzle-layout control, and roughly how many puzzles the book or worksheet set needs.

Step-by-Step Instructions

Open the Module

Pick Jigsaw Sudoku from the puzzle list. The module screen opens with the preset buttons across the top, a quantity box, and the Main, Style and Layout tabs.

Choose the Grid Size

On the Main tab, set Grid size to 9 — the default — for the standard board of nine regions of nine cells, or 6 for the compact six-digit board of six regions of six cells. The 6×6 board solves much faster, which makes it the right choice for children’s books, warm-up pages at the front of a collection, a large-print layout, or a class that has one lesson to finish the page in.

Set the Difficulty

Choose one of the seven levels: Very Easy, Easy, Normal (the default), Hard, Very Hard, Tough or Extreme. The level describes the hardest technique a solver actually needs, and the generator keeps digging until the board grades exactly there — so a “Normal” page is genuinely Normal. The grading is compensated for the extra effort irregular regions cost a human eye, so these levels line up with what the same level means on a standard sudoku.

If you are building a graded book on Standard or Creative, run one batch per level and keep them in order; on Productivity, the Time Saver step below does all seven in a single pass. For a classroom, running the same size at two adjacent levels gives you a differentiated pair for one group.

Choose the Region Layout

Region layout decides the shape language of the book. Symmetric — the default — generates layouts that read the same after a 180° turn, the classic published look, and the safer choice for a book you want to feel professionally typeset. Random drops the symmetry for free-form, more organic shapes. Both play by identical rules, so this is purely a design decision. Every puzzle still gets its own layout either way.

Set the Quantity

Type how many puzzles this run should produce into the quantity box. No two boards in a run repeat, so you can ask for a whole chapter in one go.

Style the Board

The Style tab controls how the page looks, in four groups. Font sets the family, size and colour of every digit. Colors sets the canvas background and the cell fill. Lines carries three rows: Cell Border for the thin cell gridlines, Region Border for the heavy outlines that define the jigsaw shapes, and Puzzle Border for the frame around the whole board. Region Border is the one to thicken if you are printing small — those outlines are the puzzle, so they should never be ambiguous.

The fourth group, Region colors, turns the board into a colour edition. Switch it from Regions Transparent to Use Region Fill Colors and every cell is filled with its region’s colour, with neighbouring regions always given different colours. At 9×9 with the full palette every region gets a colour of its own, so the shapes read instantly — which makes the coloured version genuinely easier for beginners and a natural children’s or large-print edition. Nine soft print tints come as standard, you can pick your own, and the randomise button rolls a fresh pastel set.

Save the result as a preset from the buttons at the top of the screen, and the whole look — fonts, colours, line weights, region tints — comes back on the next book with one click. The full styling workflow is covered in How to Customize Puzzle Designs in Puzzle Maker Pro.

Set the Title

Titles live on the Layout tab. Smart Titles fills the title in from the puzzle’s own settings, so a hundred pages label themselves correctly without you typing a hundred titles. Jigsaw Sudoku offers:

Custom — your own text (the default)
Jigsaw Sudoku — e.g. “Jigsaw Sudoku”
Jigsaw Sudoku Size — e.g. “Jigsaw Sudoku 9 × 9”
Jigsaw Sudoku Difficulty — e.g. “Jigsaw Sudoku Normal”
Jigsaw Sudoku Size Difficulty — e.g. “Jigsaw Sudoku 9 × 9 Normal”
Size — e.g. “9 × 9”
Difficulty — e.g. “Normal”
Size Difficulty — e.g. “9 × 9 Normal”

The same list also fills the puzzle’s description field. How the control works, and how to combine it with numbering, is covered once in How to Create Smart Puzzle Titles in Puzzle Maker Pro.

The Layout tab also holds the puzzle-layout control, where the output image size and the crop live, and a Use branding toggle (off unless you turn it on) that paints your branding template onto this collection’s puzzle image.

Generate and Export

Press Create in the Create Puzzles panel. Each puzzle appears with its answer key beside it, and the run writes both to your output folder in whichever of JPG, PNG, SVG and print PDF you have ticked in the app’s output settings, which are shared by every module. SVG is the one to keep if you expect to rescale artwork later; PDF is the one to hand to a print layout.

From Creative up, the same run also builds a Puzzle Slides deck for teaching or streaming, so the puzzles you just made are ready to work through on screen as well as on paper. On Creative + Interactive or Productivity + Interactive you additionally get the web-playable version for your own site.

Scale Up to a Book

Two features turn a run into a product. Time Saver (Productivity) drives many rows at once, each with its own size, difficulty, layout style, styling and quantity, so an entire graded book comes out of a single click instead of seven separate runs. Puzzle Book Studio assembles the pages into the finished book with front matter, contents and answer sections. See How to Batch Create Puzzles with Time Saver and Puzzle Book Studio Tutorials.

A Second Product Line: Letters, Colours or Pictures

Jigsaw sudoku does not need numbers. Nothing in the puzzle depends on a digit’s value — a solver only has to tell nine things apart — so on Creative and above the board can be rendered with letters, colour swatches or your own images instead, and the logic is untouched. That is a whole second product line from the same generator: a picture edition for pre-readers, an alphabet edition, a themed set built around your own artwork, or a classroom set that works before a child can read. The shared workflow is covered in How to Use Content Variation in Puzzle Maker Pro.

Outcome

You have a folder of jigsaw sudoku pages with matching answer keys, at a size, difficulty and shape style you chose, in the formats your printer or platform wants — and a preset you can reuse for the next book. Add Time Saver and Puzzle Book Studio and the same settings produce a complete graded collection instead of a page.

FAQ

How many puzzles can I make in one run?
Set whatever quantity the job needs — a chapter or a whole book. Every level generates in well under a second, and no two boards in a run repeat.

Which edition do I need to batch-create a whole book?
Productivity, which adds Time Saver and Puzzle Book Studio Productivity. Standard and Creative generate one run at a time, and Instant Puzzle Books still assembles those pages into a book PDF.

Can I design the region shapes myself?
The generator creates the layouts, which is what keeps every page in a book different from the last. Choose Symmetric for the classic published look or Random for free-form shapes, and each puzzle gets a fresh layout in that style.

What formats can I export?
JPG, PNG, SVG and print PDF for the page itself, plus a Puzzle Slides deck from Creative up. The Interactive editions add the web-playable version.

Where do the answer keys come from?
Every puzzle is generated with its solution, and the run writes both — so an answer section at the back of the book, or the answer page in a worksheet pack, costs you nothing extra.

Should I use the coloured regions or the outlined ones?
Outlined is the traditional look and the cheaper print. Coloured regions make the shapes read at a glance, which suits children’s books, large-print editions, classroom sets and anything aimed at a first-time jigsaw solver. Many publishers sell both.