Through Science News Online, I came across this Belgian site that features pentomino sudokus. I’ve always found pentominos interesting and they often turn up in puzzles, so the idea of combining pentominoes and sudoku is an interesting one. What they have come up with so far are jigsaw sudokus that use pentominos to form the sections (both 5X5 and 10X10 sudokus.)
When I see these puzzles, I want to break them apart into their component pentominos and then have the puzzler reassemble the pieces and solve the sudoku. I’m not sure how well thiswould work, but it would be an interesting idea to explore futher.
One of the World Sudoku Championship puzzles (written by Cihan Altay) involved placing 9 3×3 transparent pieces in a grid and then solving the sudoku from there. (The font was such that the numbers could be rotated — 5 and 2 are exact inversions of each other.) I imagine a similar arrangement can be reached with pentominoes.
Play Sudoku online in the cool new MULTIPLAYER mode (2 players). http://www.SudokuCombat.com provides puzzles in easy, medium and hard levels. SudokuCombat is free and fully web 2.0. No subscription required, no crappy java applets, no advertising. Just fun!
Another great online sudoku game can be found on http://www.sudoku.gs
This site is an interesting twist on the ‘Million Dollar Homepage’ idea and has a flash game with four levels from easy to fiendish.