Only four days remain to get in on the Kickstarter for Cracking the Cryptic's Greatest Hits Volume 2!
If you have even a passing interest in #sudoku, you owe it to yourself to develop a deeper interest, and preferably to do so before this campaign ends Friday.
I have the first volume from last year's Kickstarter, and it is fantastic, but many of the puzzles are fiendishly difficult for me, so I haven't finished them all. Also, the campaign hit a stretch goal for spiral binding, so I've upgraded my pledge this time around to get a reprint of that first volume that can lay flat on a table more easily.
I don't get anything out of this pitch, I just love the YouTube channel, love the first book, and want to see Simon and Mark continue to succeed.
@trinsec I should add that every one of these puzzles is hand-crafted, none assembled by computer. Most sites I've found that have exorbitant numbers of sudoku puzzles to solve generated them automatically, even the ones with a new puzzle every day. These CtC guys loathe the very concept of computer-generated puzzles.
With hand-crafted puzzles, you can be led along a solve path that is often elegant to watch unfold.
@pwinn I had to skip like 5 minutes of talk because of all the thanks and sponsor talks. 😂 (also a reason I watch very little YouTube nowadays). But other than that, this does seem to be one of the puzzle video series that a buddy of mine kept referring to about how great some puzzles are.
Looks tempting. I like weird rules that makes you think
Also, what sudoku software do they seem to use there in the video? I like the way it can highlight and such!
Oh never mind, I just found the link in their video description, led me right to there. 😋
Would you say this is suitable for trying to do a bit in bed 30 mins before you're in dreamland?
@trinsec Oh yeah, there is actually no sponsor stuff, but the promotion and birthday greetings can get long some days. Once the Kickstarter is over, that should help a little.
It depend on how good at sudoku you are. Many of those puzzles aren't likely to be solved within 30 minutes, so you'll spend a few minutes the next night remembering where you left off. Or, if you're like me, you'll pull the equivalent of "just one more chapter" and then it's an hour later. 😆
@pwinn I'm very good at spreading out one chapter over several days! Or even weeks. It's how I solved my Sudoku+1s until I ran out of those.
@trinsec Variant sudoku puzzles, yes. Last volume started with a single "classic" sudoku, but then added a series of variant rules to make things more... interesting. For example, the YouTubers responsible for this book just posted one of their twice-daily videos that features a puzzle with what appear to be four (4) variant rules in addition to the normal rules of sudoku.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jSAUaGiuhI
I haven't watched it yet, but that's the sort of puzzle one should find in the book. In that case, it looks like: Knight's Move, Little Killers, Killer Sudoku, and a rule I've never seen before involving a pink line.