A new Sudoku layout with 81 uniquely shaped cells | Hacker News Reader

A new Sudoku layout with 81 uniquely shaped cells

danielchasehooper.com

188 pointsdmit75 comments

It's an interesting idea but I really don't like it.

The runs not being visible makes it a really unsatisfying experience - you just kindof click around hoping that a cell is part of a long run (and therefore more constrained).

Most runs are length 2-3 as well and entirely within the the same "region", so are therefore redundant as they're already constrained by box logic.

Nice idea but its a miss for me.

OP Here, I'm gonna try drawing all non-redundant lines to see if it improves the feel. UPDATE: done.

I will say that it took time for me to develop an intuition for where to focus solving efforts. I think if people spend a little time with it you wont have to click around as much to know where the next break in is.

I think it would, though there is a risk it'd be too cluttered visibly. But it does add the option of printing which is nice.

Looking at your example puzzle with all lines visible; the 8742 line in the top right and 896 in the bottom right are both redundant (second one doubly so since it's all givens). Maybe 50% of the two-cell lines are redundant and 33% of the 3-cell; so it might be manageable?

try it now, I think showing the runs is an improvement. I think theres a few more things I can do to improve the visuals. I also updated the article to make the rules for runs more general - a human could place them anywhere they'd like without the even/odd side constraint.

Nice!

I don't have time to do a full solve but I got the first few digits. That plays significantly better to me.

> I think theres a few more things I can do to improve the visuals.

You could:

• Make the run lines thicker, and use Bézier curves to give them a flow, which is easier to process as a whole than a series of thin line segments.

Internal dots, dashes, criss-crosses or other textures would further visually set lines apart from each other and make them easier to visually follow.

• Apply a faded background color to the end tiles. Have dead-ends stop at the edge of end-tiles, with a large terminal dot on the edge line. Shading, edge-dots, and lack of internal lines will help all the end-tiles stand out from the other tiles, even when glancing at the diagram as a whole.

• When you select a tile, also highlight the run lines that go through it by adding outline along the (now thicker) paths, or a bolder/saturated color. Highlight the numbers along those lines. And background highlight the end-tiles of those runs.

• You could put a vertical bar of the 1-9 buttons on both the left and right sides. Easier access than below the game.

• Then the other buttons can be a row below. Reducing the puzzles + buttons total vertical dimension. (You could add a little framing space on top.)

I think those might make the puzzle more attractive, reactive and add to its distinctive look. And make the different logic of each puzzle easier to visually process.

Solved my first puzzle!

This was hard, but fun!

One suggestion: make empty spaces visually distinct from filled spaces. Why? Because cell 73 in the tenth puzzle (today's) is small enough that I completely overlooked it, and used faulty logic to deduce all but two spaces before I discovered it. I was ready to file a bug report!

I'll meet you halfway— if you'll please consider my feature request, I'll go visit my optometrist. :D

Solved, and it was fun! But...some of the colored lines were hard to see. Particularly the light yellow ones. I had one "alternate" solution that it was marking incorrect for reasons it took me over a minute to spot...and it was just a super light yellow line I missed without really scrunching up to my screen.

Improving the color choice might help, but slightly thicker lines I think would also be of significant help.

Also, it's common for sudoku solvers to allow you to press Shift+number to do a one-off toggle for the "note" checkmark.

Thanks for showing this off!

I played through the daily puzzle:

1. It was really hard in dark mode to see what I was doing

2. Scanning was almost impossible without clicking and seeing the runs -- so it was mostly fully pencil mark and find pairs and triples.

Overall, unique, but I think some further constraints or human-setters (as you mentioned) could lead to more intuitive or clever paths to a solution.

(Perhaps instead of lines, shade the cells in the runs to avoid clutter with borders and writing over numbers)

I removed dark mode because it was too hard to make a dark color scheme that was as legible as light.

the puzzle now shows all runs all the time.

Lol and I wondered why it came back light after reload. It was really fun after you got past the UX hurdles! Pity there aren't more online.

New puzzle every day! I have thousands queued up!

I appreciate the work you've put into this, but if someone gets into this they are likely to be looking for a next puzzle immediately. They are unlikely to become a recurring visitor; not with just a single puzzle a day. 5 or 10 might work better.

I'll give it a shot, but IMHO while the logic of "runs" isn't super complex, it is way too hard to see at a glance and so I don't see myself giving much time to this.

Yeah. It's an original idea, but it just doesn't feel playable at all.

I feel that this sentence from the blog post should have made some alarm bells ring:

> Sometimes I fall back on selecting cells randomly until I find one with highly constraining runs.

Clicking through individual cells one by one sounds really tedious, but this also makes it clear that playing through puzzles doesn't build up some ability to see the runs at a glance.

I think the only way you make this work is by eliminating the concept of run being entirely determined by the board layout. There would need to be way fewer (mostly longer) lines, they should always be visible, and they should be set up by the puzzle constructor to be interesting rather than with purely a mechanical rule.

OP Here, I'll try drawing all non-redundant lines, see if it feels better. UPDATE: done. give it a shot.

It's an improvement, playble enough that I finished a puzzle.

It still wasn't particularly engaging though, but a purely mechanical exercise in pencilmarking and ticking off the obvious conflicts. It's answering the question of "could you have an irregular layout" rather than "what kind of interesting puzzles can you design only with an irregular layout". There was not a single "oh, wait, this ruleset actually also implies X" deductive leap, no place where it felt like there was some cool emergent property of the ruleset.

I agree. I played one game and it was more frustrating/annoying than satisfying. I just didn’t find it enjoyable and I usually find hard sudoku pretty enjoyable. The run rule makes sense but it just didn’t get any more intuitive the longer I played.

My girlfriend really enjoys this. I have a design improvement suggestion: the connector lines should just go straight from the center of the opposite edges without also going through the center of the polygon as a midpoint. Going through the midpoint causes them to bend slightly and also become indistinguishable, but if they did not all go through that point, they would be unlikely to all intersect on the same exact point and be easier to tell apart.

I'm currently tweaking the line paths in a way similar to what you're describing!

I just realized my idea would make it less clear that the number in the given cell is part of the chain... so what you have definitely works, and looking forward to your update!

Better yet: make them quadratic Bézier curves (`q` in SVG paths) with the cell center as the control point. That removes all jaggedness and also prevents them from meeting at a point as you describe.

I’m confused, some of the colored lines only go through a few cells, shouldn’t they all go through 9 of them?

"Runs are a strip of 2 to 9 cells"

I was thinking - maybe the generator (or constructor) can opportunistically lengthen runs so that there are more opportunities for using them for exclusion. You know the bread and butter for sudoku solving - the pair of pencil marks that excludes a number along its row/column. If that's done, maybe the puzzle can be made harder in other respects, like removing clues.

I solved today's puzzle, it's nice. Of course missing the "QoL" features of the popular solvers (I'm not a daily sudoku solver right now though)

It's a valid logic puzzle as it is, but I agree with you that calling it a “Sudoku” is a stretch for the reason you stated.

I guess when I'm solving sudoku I lean on "runs" being all 9 so I know which of the 9 go into certain spots

I'm sure I'm not seeing something that lets me advance, but I'm just stuck with a lot of cells with two options.

it's also not clear why some "runs" just connect adjacent cells. I assumed adjacency (across zones) didn't matter because of that but the puzzle warned me when I broke that rule.

the 2-cell long runs are explained by this in the article "Runs terminate on cells with an odd number of sides"

runs are shown between all adjacent cells.

>That’s a confusing explanation for something I hope you intuitively understand from the image above.

heh... not quite intuitive to me I guess

my confusion (as best as I can tell through the fog of confusion) is that adjacent cells seem to not be allowed to have the same number... and also there are a bunch of obviously adjacent cells with lines connecting only those two cells (but also a lot of obviously adjacent cells with no lines connecting them.) Those lines connecting only two plainly adjacent cells are confusing me.

You don't need to understand the rules for how the generator placed the runs to solve, you can just look at the runs.

well, I need to understand something to make any progress... I'm obviously confused about what I'm confused about

I am in principle in favor of inventive gameplay and twisting existing form factors, but this actually grossed me out as if it were gore and I had to close the tab before even knowing what was going on.

Pretty surprising to be honest. I feel like I've discovered a new phobia.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Trypophobia

An interesting idea that sadly just isn’t fun to play.

I'm not sure Sudoku is really ever fun to play. It's more of a litmus test to see how well you've developed your logic. And it can be satisfying when you get a good answer.

I think Sudoku can be very fun to play with new rules, when you begin thinking in higher abstractions. I'm a big fan of anti-knight rules.

I look forward everyday to see what new puzzles are out on the Cracking-the-cryptic channel.

IMO, your use of the word 'satisfying' is to me the definition of fun!

Negative constraints like anti-knight significantly improve my enjoyment of Sudoku. They make it more likely that puzzles don't devolve to straight Sudoku near the end.

I think regular sudoku is fun.

On my phone, I've got 566 hours logged in 7700 games. I think it's fun :)

Isn't it a bit presumptuous to assume that it is “never” fun to play just because you don't find it fun?

having fun with this. I like the longer runs better but it feels kind of crowded, I wonder if you could optimize for fewer+longer? also just had the thought you could fit this into arbitrary bounding shapes, not just a square...

completed the day's puzzle! it's a bit hard to keep the runs in my head. what if instead of run lines, the polygons had a background, like stripes for one run, checkers for another, and half/half for ones with both? I don't think this idea is quite right, but it might spark something from someone else.. I'm colorblind, which may have something to do with how hard it was to keep track of the runs. maybe they could be kept as lines, but with some as dashes, some dots, some solid, etc?

It would be mighty helpful to color-code the colored run-lines by length

I.e. if red was always 2 cells long, green was always 3, etc

The length of the lines plays a significant role. Especially if you get one that's 9 long

This is quite nice! Thank you for sharing it. I think i came here after the good feedback had been incorporated. So i did not find anything confusing. It was quite fun to solve.

Cool concept, but I was repeatedly tripped up by very similarly colored lines running through the same cell. Would love it if you could hover over a line and have it highlight.

Fun, thanks for sharing.

A couple of suggestions, usability-wise:

* when a single cell is selected, it'd be very helpful if the game would auto-highlight all other cells connected to it.

* when the whole thing is solved, "Check" message should be just "Looks good", i.e. w/o "... so far" ... or perhaps just paint the whole field green, shoot a firework or do something else mildly rewarding to confirm the victory :)

When the whole thing is solved it says "you did it". You missed a cell.

I don't think I did - https://i.imgur.com/PzLjlp7.png ... ?

Bottom right corner, to the right of the 5.

I just updated the app to tell you how many cells are blank. If it's less than 4, it'll select them so you see where they are.

Dang, didn't see it :) And thanks for the patch.

I liked it thanks, i thought it was fun to play, i got an intuition for things after a while and i found it relaxing.

The instructions took a moment or two to understand for me.

Please add an option to adjust the thickness of colored lines. Right now it's more of an eyesight test for me.

Options are almost never the right solution

OK this is fun! Congratulations.

That said, I urge you to find a designer friend to give you an hour or so playing a puzzle and talking through how to improve the playability. Basically all the complaints from people who tried it revolve around UI, which is absolutely improvable.

The improvement needed is to have a human construct the puzzles and lay out run lines, cells, and groups more tastefully than a program can.

Add a timestamp for when it resets. Don't just say it's every 24 hours. Make it clear to users, don't reset underneath them. It's a globe and one person's cenvenient reset time might be another person's lunch break.

Around midnight LA time, except the code may have a bug (?) with respect to DST changes (uses explicit UTC-8, which won't be correct the whole year). See source code at https://danielchasehooper.com/projects/cracked-sudoku/script...

It doesn’t reset underneath them.

Interesting idea, but for clarity the cells need to be smoothed to ensure each cell edge has a minimum length.

eg. In the example image the top-left cluster has a given 9, where the orange line marking the run goes out to the right at what to me looks like a corner.

yes, that improvement was implied but not explicitly spelled out under future work. I'll update to clarify.

The lack of arrow shortcuts for navigation really throws me off (especially since both the mouse and the numpad are normally used by the right hand). Although cells have more than 4 neighbors, there's still a notion of direction; maybe just break ties by what is closer to the previous cell? Or use a subgrid? SGT's "bridges" and "map" puzzles may be interesting; the former doesn't care about neighbors but the puzzle guarantees indirect connectivity somehow, whereas the latter uses a subgrid. "Loopy" which has all sorts of shapes just gives up and disables it, even though good solutions exist for even for non-square grids :(.

Is your "at most 9" logic preventing loops?

I think I could probably get used to visualizing runs on my own if only the shapes weren't so irregular. In particular, the fact that there can be apparent "four corners" means it's impossible to tell which way the run actually connects; you should probably tweak the grid to ensure a minimum edge size (or maybe even forcibly align it to an orthogonal-with-diagonals grid? Either way, remember you don't need to stay Voronoi). Actually, to reduce visual clutter, maybe color the edges rather than the lines crossing them? Perhaps make odd-sided polygons blatantly different too?

Serious sudoko solvers have at least 2 kinds of pencil markings - I find "top" and "bottom" most convenient. Maybe insert an underscore at the end of the "active" set of numbers? (or overdraw for pen marks). But for puzzles complicated enough to need bifurcation, I really just need an arbitrary grid where I can put any number at any location in any order - or else an option to fork the entire puzzle.

And of course there needs to be a "fill in all pencil marks so I can work subtractitively" button.

I liked it fwiw! Fun to play and solve. Thanks!

That was a fun puzzle! You should add a confirmation to the reset button - my finger slipped and accidentally hit it.

reset is undoable

Oh, I never would have guessed

First of all love it!

Second of all I hate you for giving me a new game to procrastinate with.

Thirdly, please make the lines more visible!

Isn't this just sudoku with the squares morphed into irregular shapes?

No, the irregular shape allows run constraints that wouldn't be possible on a grid using rows/columns/lines.

It's "weaker" and different constraints than a sudoku.

A regular sudoku requires all 1-9 numbers in three containers: in the box, in the row and in the column.

This variant still has the 1-9 boxes, but instead of rows and columns it has lines, and the lines do not encompass all numbers 1-9. They only say numbers can't repeat on that line. You can't use completeness for the lines (It would be something like "all numbers 1-9 must occur along a line").

I suspect that the missing completeness is a drawback of this sudoku variant, it makes it a bit less interesting in the long run.

I can’t explain why but I get anxiety just looking at that.

Having looked at that, I now have a headache.

This is giving me some strong Voronoi vibes

"These layouts are generated from Voronoi Diagrams"

Hi there!

As someone who's had some amount of professional work on games/toys I have bad news: I hate this (it's okay, I hate lots of perfectly good things!) from a UI/UX standpoint.

"Nobody has changed the layout of Sodoku..." there might be a reason for that. When you're trying to create organized lists/sequences, a messy visual is going to be frustrating. The geometry/symmetry of a Sodoku is part of the appeal. Think of a crossword: does the shape affect the fun? You might see circles vs squares, or some people building shapes by arranging the word lengths creatively, but nobody is trying to have the across words in one column and the down words floating in a nebulous space nearby, because that's not a crossword.

What value does this change bring? Why do you think there's more fun in the difficult to parse shapes over the clean rows/lines of standard sodoku? The changes seem to make it much harder to gronk how the game works and provide little added "fun" value. Think of it this way: you can play sudoku blindfolded and have someone fill the grid in for you. This would make it much more challenging (with essentially a UI change like your change) but not necessarily more fun for most people because the challenge isn't what the game is about. It would be similar to playing baseball in ankle deep water, or Halo using a DDR pad: novel and quirky, but missing what makes the game compelling in the first place.

I think this is a cool thought experiment and a great way to illustrate some concepts of game design (sadly, as a way of what NOT to do) and for that you should be really proud! Hope you're able to take something productive from my post.

I think it has two things going for it: it's visually striking, and the sudoku sphere is already full of alternate designs and layouts, and this will fit right in, in that sense!

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