Show HN: SudokuVariants – play and construct different variants of Sudoku | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: SudokuVariants – play and construct different variants of Sudoku

sudokuvariants.com

28 pointsstanac15 comments

Hi HN, I've been working on this Sudoku web app for the past couple of years, on and off during free weekends and afternoons. I started working on it because I was bored during COVID, and Cracking the Cryptic had just become popular on YouTube, which got me wondering how hard it could be to make a Sudoku app. The main idea is for the app to understand the constraints and know how to solve Sudoku grids (and not just be a simple Sudoku drawing/playing app). When it comes to classic Sudoku, the solver doesn't support anything more complicated than X-Wing, but it understands the constraints.

At the moment, most of the popular variants are supported: killer, sandwich, arrow, thermo, palindrome, German whisper, kropki, consecutive, non-consecutive, greater than, XV, diagonal, anti-king, anti-knight, even-odd, windoku, renban, and zipper. The only variant I am yet to add support for is quadruple. If any other variant becomes popular, I will probably add it, as was the case with zipper lines during development.

A user account is not required to play, but it is required if you want to publish a public grid on the app. The app doesn't collect any PII, doesn't have ads or trackers. Accounts are identified by email hash; I am not storing email addresses or passwords, and OTPs are sent by email. The less I know about users, the better for both sides.

The app supports mobile devices, but it works best on bigger screens. It was built using Blazor SSR/WASM (AOT) with SVG for interactive parts. I know there are some performance issues (especially on mobile phones and with touch input), and I am trying to address them.

Some of the features I was thinking about adding are classifying grids by difficulty, daily Sudoku, and maybe campaigns (groups of Sudoku grids where users have to solve them in order).

If you like Sudoku, or more specifically variants of Sudoku, please let me know what you think about SudokuVariants.

URL: https://sudokuvariants.com

Thanks!

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Looks neat.

The CtC community is pretty prolific, and if your colors could match theirs that'd be much easier to parse. https://youtu.be/mkomrpQG388?t=212 has most of them all at once, I think palindrome is the only one missing from there.

Also, if your solver could pick up shift for corner marks and control/command for center marks, that'd be a nice quality of life pickup compared to Sudokupad.

Thanks, I was matching colors of another popular Sudoku app. Ultimately it would be best to allow users to configure colors and other presentation attributes (thickness of the line, alpha, dotted/dashed, etc...).

The CtC community sometimes overlaps with, and mentions in their vids, https://www.dailykillersudoku.com/ which also has a nice UX, especially for helping compute totals and possible sum-partitions. Some features might bear imitating/flattering.

I didn't know about that one, looks neat. Thanks.

Sums of cages and selected numbers (even outside of killer/sandwich) were a must have feature for me, so I implemented those features early. Also combinations are available for single cage or multiple selected cages and for selected sandwich.

Something I wish DKS did better was Fill. If you have selected a cage and press F, it will fill the cage with all the possible combinations on the right panel. Instead, I think it should take only the ones you haven't ruled out by de-selecting them.

I like it showing you the possibilities when you click on a cell in a cage, but I was really wishing they had a "press shift and the number to set the cell value" feature. I messed myself up a couple of times by unselecting the wrong number when attempting to set the cell and not noticing for a couple of moves. For example, if a 10 cage is a 28 pair and I figure out that the left one is a 2 and the right is an 8, I was clicking on the left and hitting 2, making an error.

If you hold shift while hitting the number it should just set the cell to that number, not just erase a mark.

+1 on matching the CTC 'standards'. You'll get significantly more user adoption if the conventions match.

What a lovely site, and thank you for all the devotion to being user friendly.

You've added something wonderful and artistic to the world, can't wait to try it out more tonight :)

Thank you for your kind words.

I wrote a 3d version of sudoku where every slice of a cube was a valid sudoku. It was an awful game. At first it was difficult to wrap your head around the 3d, but once you did it offered so many more clues as to be boring and 95% of the time would be filling out easy cubes.

Cool experiment though :)

This sounds like a cool one-time solve. Solving high level traditional sudukos is mostly about learning "rules" (like The Phistomefel Ring). I imagine the equivalent in 3d would be too complex for a human to parse.

too complex, or is he saying "there are no complex 3D puzzles, too much information"

For sudoku, it worked out that the balance was awful. I imagine if I put in the absolute minimal clues for 3d sudoku it would be challenging and have some more advanced techniques. It just wasn't a good game.

Don't get me wrong, there is probably some niche of players who would like that, but I wasn't going to do the last 90% of polishing a game, writing a solution evaluator, and probably having to play it a ton just to finish it off.

I did end up getting some interviews based on the game. It's amazing how well it worked for the games industry where they have well over 90% of people applying with nothing tangible to show on their resume or portfolio.

My first introduction to Killer Cage, thanks!

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