Sudoku Written by Brian Hamilton and Karan Hamilton.
Brian and Karan are the puzzle lovers and game makers behind Sudoku Online Puzzles. You can learn more on the About page.
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The New York Times publishes three sudoku a day, Easy, Medium and Hard, in its Games app and on its website. People look for an alternative for one of three reasons: today’s three are done and they want another, Hard has stopped being hard, or they missed a day and want to go back to it. Here is what the NYT offers, from its own pages in October 2026, and where each of those leads on this site.
What does NYT Sudoku offer?
According to the NYT’s help page, there are “three levels of difficulty that can be selected for Sudoku: Easy, Medium, Hard”, and you can play them in the Games app, at nytimes.com/puzzles/sudoku, or in the Games section of the main New York Times app (NYT Help Center, Sudoku). A new set appears the evening before the date it carries: the three dated Tuesday 20 October 2026 went up on the Monday evening.
The puzzle comes with a Candidate Mode for pencil marks, an Auto-Candidate Mode that fills them all in, Undo, an optional check of each entry as you type it, an error counter, highlighting of the row, column and matching digits, and a dark theme in the app.
Is NYT Sudoku free?
Yes. The help page says “Sudoku can be played with or without a subscription.” The same page adds: “Sudoku does not have statistics or an archive at this time.” You can play today’s three free, but you cannot go back to yesterday’s, so a page that describes a paid NYT sudoku archive is describing something the NYT says it doesn’t have.
How hard is NYT Hard sudoku?
The NYT doesn’t publish how it rates its puzzles, so we ran the three dated 20 October 2026 through our Sudoku Helper, which always takes the simplest move it can find from eighteen named techniques. Easy began with 38 givens and fell to naked singles alone. Medium and Hard both began with 23 givens; each was finished by singles plus one or two pointing pairs, Medium needing one and Hard two. One day is a small sample, but on that day nothing in the NYT’s Hard went past locked candidates.
We did the same with 40 fresh boards from each of the levels on our classic sudoku page, and with the first 40 puzzles of each of our two banks:
| Puzzles | Givens | Hardest step our helper needed |
|---|---|---|
| NYT Easy, 20 Oct 2026 | 38 | Naked singles |
| NYT Medium, 20 Oct 2026 | 23 | One pointing pair |
| NYT Hard, 20 Oct 2026 | 23 | Two pointing pairs |
| Our Easy and Medium | 40 and 32 | Singles on every board |
| Our Hard | 26 | Locked candidates on 5 of 40 |
| Our Expert | 22–24 | Naked pairs on 2 of 40; locked candidates on 13 |
| Our Evil | 24–27 | Hidden pairs, wings, Skyscrapers, Almost Locked Sets; 13 of 40 beyond all eighteen techniques |
| Our Extreme | 22–25 | Beyond all eighteen on all 40 |
Graded with the helper’s own hint order in October 2026: the NYT puzzles as published that day, 40 boards per level from our generator on a fixed seed, and the first 40 lines of the Evil and Extreme banks. “Locked candidates” covers pointing pairs and box/line reduction.
NYT Medium and Hard started from the same 23 givens on 20 October; the difference was one pointing pair. Our Evil bank’s 5,000 puzzles start from a median of 26 givens, more than our Expert’s 23, yet none of them can be finished with the singles, locked candidates and naked pairs that finish every Expert board. Difficulty is the technique a puzzle forces, not the space it leaves empty.
Where should you go after NYT Hard?
On that day’s evidence, the NYT’s Hard asks about what our Hard does: singles, with locked candidates where they stall. If it has become routine, the steps up are:
- Expert, the last level our generator digs, which adds naked pairs and never needs more. Over 200 boards a level, our Easy to Expert never needed anything past naked pairs.
- Evil, a bank of 5,000 puzzles chosen because they stall at exactly that point. Our helper’s eighteen techniques finish about three in four of them; the rest need chains of reasoning it does not search for.
- Extreme, 5,000 more, 4,980 of them from a list of the toughest puzzles known, kept by players on the Enjoy Sudoku forum. On those 4,980, none of the eighteen techniques makes a single move at the start.
- 17-clue sudoku, for the fewest givens a sudoku can have: every one of its 49,158 puzzles has exactly 17. The famous named puzzles, Arto Inkala’s among them, are on our hardest sudoku ever page.
Does the NYT have Killer Sudoku or other variants?
Not as of October 2026. Its help page describes the classic nine-by-nine rules and three levels, and the list of New York Times Games on its sudoku page, from the Crossword and Wordle to Pips and Letter Boxed, names no Killer Sudoku or other sudoku variant. If the rules themselves have gone stale, a variant changes more than a harder level does. Killer Sudoku replaces the givens with cage totals; its generator proves each board has exactly one answer before you see it, and its levels run from cages of one or two squares on Easy to five on Expert. Jigsaw Sudoku bends the boxes, and Samurai Sudoku overlaps five grids.
Is there a daily sudoku with an archive?
Ours has one. The daily sudoku gives everyone the same puzzle each day, and its calendar lets you open any past day back to the first puzzle, on 11 April 2026. The level follows the week: Easy on Monday and Tuesday, Medium on Wednesday and Thursday, Hard on Friday, Expert on Saturday and Sunday. Your current and best streaks are kept in the browser you play on.
If you would rather keep the NYT’s fixed levels, there are daily Easy, Medium and Hard puzzles with their own calendars, and daily Killer, Jigsaw, X-Sudoku, Samurai, Sandwich and Wordoku for a change of rules.
How do you get better at sudoku than NYT Hard asks?
Our measurements have an awkward consequence: the techniques that open an Evil puzzle, hidden pairs, X-Wings and wings, are almost never needed on everyday puzzles, so playing more of them doesn’t teach those techniques. Two tools exist for that gap:
- The helper takes a position you are stuck on, names the simplest technique that applies, shows the cells involved and links to the guide that teaches it.
- The Sudoku Trainer drills one technique at a time: eighteen of them, from naked singles to Almost Locked Sets, with ten real positions each, every pencil mark showing.
Play our Expert until naked pairs are automatic. Then spend a week in the trainer on hidden pairs, the most common first step past the stall on our Evil puzzles, before you start an Evil puzzle. When one stalls, take a single hint from the helper, read the technique’s name, and look for the pattern yourself before reading the explanation.
What other sudoku sites are there?
Two other free sites come up often, described here from their own pages as of October 2026:
- Sudoku.com, from Easybrain, offers six classic levels on the web, Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert, Master and Extreme, a Killer mode, and apps for iPhone and Android. It is free with advertising: “Ads help us keep our game free” (Sudoku.com).
- Web Sudoku promises “Billions of Free Sudoku Puzzles to Play Online” at “four levels from Easy to Evil”, in the browser on computers, tablets and phones (Web Sudoku).
If you want sudoku on a dedicated device or in an app, our electronic sudoku guide covers handhelds, the Switch and apps. And if classic sudoku itself is wearing thin, the sudoku variations list and our guide to games like sudoku start where a 9×9 grid stops.