Logic Masters Deutschland e.V.

Normal Sudoku rules apply.

Summary: all rules are standard. The short thick line is a palindrome and there is a renban line in box 5. An anti-knight and anti-X constraint apply throughout the grid.

Specifically: Digits in cages may not repeat and sum to the total in the corner of the cage. Digits may not repeat on the main diagonals. Digits on the other marked diagonal sum to the given total and may repeat where allowed by the other rules. Cells a knight's move apart may not contain the same digit. Orthogonally adjacent cells may not sum to 10. The thick grey line is a palindrome (reads the same forward and backward). The thin grey line contains four consecutive digits in any order (renban line). The cell with the grey dot contains an odd digit. The stem of the cup is left to the imagination.

Here is the SudokuPad link (with answer check): My cup runneth over

Here it is on F-Puzzles: My cup runneth over

"Intensely" in the title comes from danmeehan91324's comment on my puzzle "The Fool's Windmill", which was my first foray into an exploration of 7-cell 35 cages. I thought such cages might work well with an anti-knight constraint, and tried several arrangements without success. I tracked down my problem to the arrangement of cages used in this grid, which was much more powerful than I expected with the anti-knight constraint, and especially so with the diagonals added.

It has proven hard to set a humanly solvable puzzle, but there is a path on this one. Bizarrely the palindrome line is equivalent to the anti-X constraint (that knowledge will not help the solve, I think) so the puzzle is redundant, and in the presence of the other clues, both could be omitted and give a unique grid. I needed them both and also to know what it was I was looking for to guide my solve.

I think this will take some patience to break, as well as insight into the delicate way in which the constraints interact, but once truly broken the solve seems to me to run smoothly. I find it astonishing and beautiful that this works at all.