Sudoku Made and maintained by Brian Hamilton and Karan Hamilton.
Brian builds the playable puzzle tools, while Karan helps test clarity, difficulty feel, and the player experience.
Playable puzzles and controls are tested in the browser for rule accuracy, usability, and a clear solving experience. See how we make and test puzzles, our editorial standards, or report a problem.
Easter sudoku with pictures: what’s in the basket?
Easter Sudoku is a sudoku you fill with Easter pictures instead of digits: each of the nine goes once in every row, column and box. Views and levels are explained once for all 21 of our picture games, on Themed Sudoku; here, the basket gets the attention.
The basket fills in a fixed order as the board gets bigger. A 4×4 board holds the 🥚 Egg, 🐰 Bunny, 🐣 Chick and 🌷 Tulip. 6×6, the default size, adds the 🧺 Basket and the 🦋 Butterfly. The 🥕 Carrot, 🌸 Blossom and 🍫 Chocolate wait for the full 9×9, so the youngest solvers get the eggs and the animals, and the chocolate comes last. Whether that is a lesson in patience is up to your household.
The two pink flowers meet only on 9×9. As Windows draws them on a phone-width 9×9, in either theme, the Tulip is a cup of petals on a green stem, the Blossom a flat round flower, and the shapes kept them apart. Nor is the hatching Chick an Egg look-alike: the Egg is brown, the Chick’s shell white. Other devices draw their own emoji, so if two blur on yours, switch to Both, which adds each picture’s number: the Tulip is 4, the Blossom 8.
Where is the egg hiding? An egg hunt you can win by logic
A garden egg hunt runs on luck. This one runs on evidence: the egg’s hiding place is not a guess but a fact, and even the youngest solver can show why it has to be in that square, which is a better feeling than being fastest across the lawn.
Pick a box with no Egg yet. Every Egg on the board rules out its own row and column, so look along the three rows and down the three columns through the box, and strike every empty square an Egg can see. When one square is left, the Egg is there. Tap any Egg and every other Egg lights up, which speeds the looking.
That is a hidden single: the Egg has one place left in the box, though the square itself could still hold two other pictures. The board is a real 9×9 Easy deal from this game, and a solver kept apart from the game counts exactly one answer for it.
A 9×9 box sits across three rows and three columns. An Egg in one of those lines, outside the box, shuts that line of the box. Shut two rows and two columns and one square of the nine is left. Shut fewer, and the pictures already in the box may close the gap: above, the Eggs shut rows 5 and 6 and column 5, leaving R4C4 and R4C6, and R4C4 holds the Basket.
Easter sudoku for kids: which board should they start on?
Start where the pictures are fewest. On 4×4 only the Egg, Bunny, Chick and Tulip play, in boxes of two by two, and the hunt shrinks to fit: one Egg in a row and one in a column through a box leave it a single square. A child who finds that easy is ready for 6×6; the 9×9 suits older children and grown-ups.
To teach the rules from scratch, Sudoku for Kids goes step by step. 4x4 Sudoku and 6x6 Sudoku take the basket away and leave the same boards in digits.
We dealt 200 boards at each size, on Easy and on Expert, from this game’s own generator and looked at each before a picture was placed. On every Easy board some picture already had a box with one place left, the move in the hunt above: a median of 11 such finds on a 9×9 Easy board, with the Egg among them on 149 of 200. On 9×9 Expert the median was 3, and 2 boards in 200 had none.
A quiet Easter activity, with nothing to print or cut out
Easter Sunday tends to peak early and crash in mid-afternoon. This board is for the crash: a 6×6 at the kids’ table while lunch is cleared, or a 9×9 for whoever wants to sit somewhere calm with the last of the chocolate. Most Easter sudoku is a sheet to print, some with picture cards to cut out; this one has nothing to set up and nothing to lose under the sofa.
The game keeps no calendar, which suits a holiday that moves. Western churches keep Easter on a Sunday between 22 March and 25 April; Orthodox churches, which date it by the Julian calendar, between 4 April and 8 May, and some years both fall on the same Sunday. A board left half done is saved in your browser for after the egg hunt.
Is Easter sudoku the same as Spring sudoku?
No, though they share three pictures. Spring Sudoku is the season’s board, with a bee, a ladybug, a seedling, rain and sunshine. The Tulip, Butterfly and Blossom are in both, but Spring deals all three on its 4×4, where Easter keeps the Butterfly for 6×6 and the Blossom for 9×9. Only the Tulip has the same number in both games, 4; the Butterfly is 6 here and 2 in Spring, the Blossom 8 here and 1 there.
A few more pictures travel: the Egg to Dinosaur Sudoku, the Carrot to Food Sudoku and the Chocolate to Valentine’s Sudoku. The Bunny, the Chick and the Basket are Easter’s alone. Under every set sits the same everyday logic, and every board has exactly one answer.