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.
@pwinn So what is this really? Puzzle scenarios you have to solve, or? The kind of stuff you can happily pass time with on the toilet?
I'm kinda burnt out on the regular sudokus that you can find anywhere. My favorite variation is the Consecutive Sudoku, or also known as Sudoku +1.
@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.
@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 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.