Advanced solving for people who already know the rules: named techniques, deduction patterns, and difficulty ladders for sudoku, logic, and number puzzles. Also useful for publishers who need to grade difficulty honestly.
After Naked Singles and Hidden Singles, the next scan that makes progress without guessing is a pair. A Naked Pair is two empty cells in the same row, column, or 3×3 box that hold the same two leftover digits. A Hidden Pair is two digits that have only two legal cells left in that house. Neither scan writes a digit. Each one strikes leftovers so a later single can place.
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X-Wing is a later advanced scan, after singles, pairs, triples, quads, pointing pairs, and box-line reduction. An X-Wing is one leftover digit that has only two homes in each of two rows, and those homes sit in the same two columns — a rectangle. The same lock with two columns and two rows is the other orientation. The scan does not write the digit. It strikes that digit from every other empty in the two cover lines.
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How to play Wordoku: it is letter Sudoku with a hidden word. The symbols are the distinct letters of one word. Fill every empty cell so each row, each column, and each box holds those letters exactly once. One row or column starts completely blank — on a board like this one, when you finish it, it spells the word. This guide uses a 6×6 board whose hidden line is STUDIO.
A multiple-choice quiz puzzle puts one question on a page with two to five lettered answers and a strip of answer boxes underneath, and exactly one answer is right. This guide explains how a printed quiz page is laid out, how the answer key works, and how to work out the right answer when you are not certain.
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Fill a 9×9 Sudoku so each row, each column, and each 3×3 box contains the digits 1 through 9 exactly once. Then a Very Easy example shows the first fills: start in a nearly-full 3×3 box, then finish a row the same way. Looking up a variant? Jump to [Dot Sudoku](#dot-sudoku), [Hyper Sudoku](#hyper-sudoku), or [Multidoku](#multidoku).
Number Blocks is the cage logic puzzle you may already know as Suguru or Tectonic. The grid is carved into bold, irregular regions. A cage with N cells must hold exactly the digits 1 through N, each once, and equal digits may not touch, not even on a diagonal. Puzzle Maker Pro generates those cages
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Every cell on a Domino Logic board shows a face value, but the domino lines are missing. Your job is to draw horizontal or vertical dominoes across neighboring cells until each unordered pair in the set appears exactly once. The puzzle is pure placement logic: no arithmetic, no guessing about hidden clues, because every face
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Magnet logic puzzles (also called Magnets in puzzle collections) give you a rectangular grid already cut into domino-sized plates. Some plates hold a two-cell magnet with one + pole and one − pole. Others are neutral: both cells stay empty of polarity. Your job is to decide which plates are magnets, which way each magnet
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To solve a word ladder, change one letter at a time to turn the top word into the bottom word, with every step a real word. The quickest way to crack one: compare the two end words, count how many letters have to change, and work in from both ends until the middle rung falls into place.
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Killer sudoku cage combinations A cage sum is a clue about a set of digits. Most solvers learn the two famous ones — a two-cell 3 is 1 and 2, a two-cell 17 is 8 and 9 — and then guess at the rest. The tables below are the whole set, enumerated rather than remembered,
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