Guillotine (Strict Killer Sudoku)
(Published on 3. July 2025, 23:25 by Feadoor)
Normal Sudoku rules apply: place a number from 1 to 9 into each cell so that every row, column and box contains each number exactly once.
Strict Killer: A clue in the top left corner of a cage indicates the sum of all numbers placed into that cage. Digits cannot repeat within a cage, including the digits used to write the cage total.
Some cage totals have been replaced by question marks. The no-repeat rule still applies to the correct value of each question mark. Cage totals cannot start with a leading zero.
For example, a 3-cell cage summing to 18 could not be formed of 4 + 6 + 8 as this repeats an 8 within the cage. As another example, there can be no cage summing to 22, because this already includes repeated digits in the total.
Solution code: Row 5, left to right
Comments
on 23. August 2025, 17:13 by skuntsel
A genuinely great arithmetic exercise to start up your brain. It is so counterintuitive how restrained the cages in fact are. Perfect implementation. Quite extensive computational power required mid-solve, but you feel refreshed as you’ve cracked it. Thanks!
on 8. July 2025, 17:56 by PierreTombal
Huh? That's weird. Was the puzzle changed? I couldn't spot anything wrong with my solution, but then I noticed that the cages in boxes 4 and 7 are different from the one I made.
on 6. July 2025, 12:01 by Exigus
That was very cool, especially the start. Thanks!
on 5. July 2025, 23:41 by Tilberg
Thank you for this! Quite tough, but I loved it. Whenever I was stuck and about to embark on some enforced bifurkation logic (about 3-4 times), I stopped and reminded myself that up until then every step was elegant and beautiful, and I just had to find the equally beautiful next logic instead of ramming a bulldozer into this delicate flowerbed. And indeed, each step was as nice as expected once I found it.
