Summary: This walkthrough takes you from an empty Killer Sudoku screen to a folder of print-ready puzzle and answer-key pages. You will choose a grid size and difficulty, style the cages for print or for colour, add a title that fills itself in, and export the whole run in one pass.
Overview
Killer Sudoku generates complete puzzle pages: a sudoku grid carved into dashed cages with a printed total in each cage corner, plus the matching answer key. Every board is checked to have exactly one solution and to be solvable by human technique at the difficulty you asked for, so nothing you export needs proofreading. Boards generate in well under a second each, 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 Killer Sudoku Puzzles Work.
Required Modules
Killer Sudoku — the module itself. A free demo covers every current module, so you can try the workflow before buying.
Killer Sudoku (this is also the Creative edition) makes the puzzle and exports the static formats (JPG, PNG, SVG and print PDF), gives you full design control over the board — including the coloured-cage edition described below — and includes Instant Puzzle Books (a book PDF assembled straight from your current page settings) plus 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. Killer Sudoku + 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: Killer Sudoku carries 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 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. Both are easier to settle once than to redo per puzzle.
Step-by-Step Instructions
Open the Module
Pick Killer 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 for the standard nine-digit board with 3×3 boxes, or 6 for the compact six-digit board with boxes two cells tall and three wide. 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, or a large-print layout where a nine-column grid would crowd the page.
Set the Difficulty
Choose one of the seven levels: Very Easy, Easy, Normal, Hard (the default), Very Hard, Tough or Extreme. The level describes the hardest technique a solver actually needs, and the generator re-rolls until the board grades exactly there — so a “Normal” page is genuinely Normal, not “somewhere under Hard”.
Very Easy through Hard also fill in a handful of cells with starting digits, which gives newer solvers a foothold. Very Hard and above are usually the pure cages-only killer. For a classroom, the lower four levels are the ones a class can finish inside a lesson, and running the same page at two levels gives you a differentiated pair for the same group.
If you are building a graded book on 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.
Set the Quantity
Type how many puzzles this run should produce into the quantity box. Every board in a run is unique — the generator will not repeat a grid inside the same batch — 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 on the board. 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 box dividers, and Cage border for the dashed cage outlines — that last one is what to thicken or darken if you are printing small.
The fourth group, Cage 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 cage’s colour, with neighbouring cages always given different colours so no cage bleeds into the one beside it. Nine soft print tints come as standard, you can pick your own, and the randomise button rolls a fresh pastel set. It is a genuinely different product from the same generator — colour killer books sell alongside black-and-white ones rather than replacing them.
Save the result as a preset from the buttons at the top of the screen, and the whole look — fonts, colours, line weights, cage 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. Killer Sudoku offers:
- Custom — your own text (the default)
- Killer Sudoku — e.g. “Killer Sudoku”
- Killer Sudoku Size — e.g. “Killer Sudoku 9 × 9”
- Killer Sudoku Difficulty — e.g. “Killer Sudoku Hard”
- Killer Sudoku Size Difficulty — e.g. “Killer Sudoku 9 × 9 Hard”
- Size — e.g. “9 × 9”
- Difficulty — e.g. “Hard”
- Size Difficulty — e.g. “9 × 9 Hard”
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.
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, style and quantity, so an entire graded book — Very Easy pages at the front, Extreme at the back — 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.
Outcome
You have a folder of killer sudoku pages with matching answer keys, at a size and difficulty 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. Boards generate in well under a second each, and every board inside a run is unique, so a large batch will not repeat a grid on you.
Which edition do I need to batch-create a whole book?
Productivity, which adds Time Saver and Puzzle Book Studio Productivity. Creative generates one run at a time, and Instant Puzzle Books still assembles those pages into a book PDF.
Can I control the size of the cages?
The generator handles cage sizes itself, mixing two to five-cell cages so the sums stay solvable and the board keeps the variety a good killer needs.
What formats can I export?
JPG, PNG, SVG and print PDF for the page itself, plus a Puzzle Slides deck. 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.
Do the colour cages cost anything in print quality?
No. The tints are chosen to stay light enough for black digits to read cleanly, and the dashed cage outlines are drawn on top either way, so a colour page still prints legibly in greyscale.