Let's start with the only puzzle that I think may have enough merit for a place on Logic Masters Deutschland, before I move on to the juicy unpublishable bits. It's this one: 007 - Anti-diagonal killer sudoku Normal 9x9 sudoku rules apply: Place the digits 1 to 9 exactly once in each row, column, and region indicated by thick borders in the grid. Anti-diagonal: Both indicated main diagonals contain only 3 distinct digits. Killer cages: An area surrounded by a dashed line is a 'killer cage'. Digits in a cage cannot repeat and sum to the number in the upper left corner. You can play puzzle 007 online in the CTC app . Warning: there are small spoilers for 007 in the text below, where I talk about what logic I used. This story starts with a brilliant puzzle pack by Sam Cappleman-Lynes which contains 27 linked sudokus, where none of the puzzles can be solved without the others. It is published in the puzzle archive of the CTC Fan discord server, entry 1649. I remember live ...
Well... indeed I initially intended to create 7 puzzles, but in the end there were 9. Stubborn as I am, I'm sticking to the 7x7x7 title. You see, the idea was to create an interesting 7x7 irregular sudoku grid, and then select seven variants to create seven different puzzles with this grid, each with a single given digit. Without thinking, I started with a 147 indexing puzzle, but one given digit in such a puzzle is never going to collapse it into a unique solution. It was too good though to not publish. So there's the first bonus. The second variant I tried that I should have thought a bit more deeply about was one with odd and even cells. To make that more interesting I added white kropki dots, and got some unusual deductions out of that. But that puzzle also didn't fit the premise of a single variant per puzzle with one given digit. With some modifications I could still use it as an introductory puzzle from which to obtain the given digits in the 7 core puzzles. And ther...