Logic Masters Deutschland e.V.

To Christmas 2023 some eager puzzlefriends have again arranged a group in which everybody had to make anonymously a puzzle for someone else. These puzzles are now presented one after the other here in the portal.

"Look what I've made: a sudoku with letters!" little Willi boasted. — "And lookit me: I made a reaaalllly big sudoku with letters along the edge," replied little Walli, not to be outdone. — "But the whole grid is empty," observed an amazed Wolli, the smallest of the gnomelings, and chewed on his colored markers. "Can I color it in?" "I have an idea," suggested Papa Gnome, as he proudly watched his talented children. "We have a 9x9 sudoku with some given letters, and we have an empty reaaalllly big grid with outside clues, and we have colored markers. I'm sure we can also scrounge up some glue and scissors. With all those things we can cut the 9x9 sudoku into its 9 boxes and paste each one into the corresponding box of the reaaalllly big grid (meaning, the little box in the top left goes in the big box in the top left, and so on). And do it in such a way, that the outside clues always indicate the first letter of the (solved) 9x9 sudoku in the associated row or column." (And in that way it will become unique, too), he thinks quietly to himself. "What do you say to my idea?" "But there are far more letters along the edge than a sudoku can have," Wolli notes. He's pretty precocious, after all. "Sure," replies Papa Gnome. "Then I guess that it only applies to those letters that actually appear in the sudoku. All the other edge clues can be ignored. But if the letter appears in the sudoku, then the clue must be respected." He turns to Wolli, who has already unsheathed his colored markers. "As for you, go ahead and draw looottts of additional letters into the big grid. But only in fields surrounding the sudoku clippings. Have fun!"