by Paul Stephens

150 hand-picked puzzles with solving tips,
techniques guide and unique candidate
pattern help!

ISBN: 978-1-84483-587-4

208pp, price £5.99 (UK)  $9.95 (USA)

Available from good bookshops,
or order now from:
Amazon.com        Amazon.co.uk

A guide to each puzzle.

Sudoku Addict's Workbook is more than just a puzzle collection - it's a hands-on training programme that takes you through different kinds of puzzle and the techniques needed to solve them.

Each puzzle is accompanied by notes telling you what to look for. Sometimes these are general hints ("you'll need to find at least three pairs"), others they'll point you right at a key candidate pattern which is appearing for the first time.

By the time you finish the puzzles, you'll have experienced all the major types of sudoku - puzzles that 'gridlock' early and late, ones that can be broken using complex static patterns such as Swordfish and Non-Unique rectangles, ones that require inference chain patterns such as nice loops. Each puzzle comes with target solving times for Improver, Expert and 'Genius' skill levels, so you can see how well you're doing.

Extra pattern tips.

Can't find that crucial candidate pattern? Let Sudoku Addict's Workbook show you! In a unique feature, the puzzle solutions show the locations of key patterns in shaded squares. As well as showing you where to look, the shaded squares also show you why some patterns let you eliminate candidates from other squares. In this example of a remote pair chain (right), the four squares have been solved 8-3-8-3, so any square that's related to an odd and even-numbered square (e.g. the 1st and 4th) couldn't possibly have contained an 8 or 3.

Solve more efficiently.

Typically in sudoku, a series of relatively easy (but still tricky) candidate patterns lead up to a tougher one - but if you find the tougher pattern first, you won't need the easier ones at all.

Efficient solving - looking for the tougher patterns earlier - is a major theme of Sudoku Addict's Workbook, with hints on puzzles that contain these 'short cuts'. There's no magic formula for knowing when a more complex pattern has appeared early in a puzzle, but by working through the examples you can develop the habit of checking for 'something better' rather than always settling for the first pattern you find.

Quick techniques reference.

Sudoku Addict's Workbook contains a 10-page quick reference guide to all the techniques you'll need to solve the puzzles in the book. It isn't intended as a solving tutorial - for that, see Mastering Sudoku - instead providing a quick reminder of how things like pairs, box claims and Swordfish work. Whether you're at home, on a train or on a beach, you won't need to look anywhere else!

The guide includes some techniques that aren't covered in Mastering Sudoku, such as BUG and multi-colouring, and extensions to the conjugate pair and forcing chain patterns. So if you're a Mastering Sudoku reader, you'll learn something new!
 

All 150 puzzles online.

If you don't want to write all over the book, or if you just prefer to solve using a keyboard and mouse, then the answer is here - all 150 puzzles from Sudoku Addict's Workbook are available online in a readers-only section here at paulspages.co.uk.

If you're a SudokuXP member (see below) then you'll be able to get more help from SudokuXP's on-screen hints and unique crosshatching assistant tool, as well as printing puzzles out and saving part-solved puzzles to disk. And if you're not a member you can load the puzzles into Sudoku@paulspages, the non-subscription version which doesn't have hints, but still lets you solve on-screen and print puzzles out.