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.
What pictures does Halloween Sudoku use?
Halloween Sudoku dresses classic sudoku up for October, with nine pictures where the digits would go: the pumpkin, ghost, bat, spider web, moon, candy, witch, skull and spider. Each picture stands for one number, so a finished board holds every picture once in each row, column and box, and you can switch back to plain numbers whenever you like.
The pictures arrive in order as the boards grow. The 4×4 board uses only the first four, the pumpkin, ghost, bat and web; the moon and candy join at 6×6; and the witch, skull and spider appear only on the full 9×9. That is simply how the game deals them, the first four, six or nine of the set, but it works out nicely here: the puzzles get spookier at exactly the rate they get harder.
| Number | Picture | Name | Boards it appears on |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 🎃 | Pumpkin | 4×4, 6×6, 9×9 |
| 2 | 👻 | Ghost | 4×4, 6×6, 9×9 |
| 3 | 🦇 | Bat | 4×4, 6×6, 9×9 |
| 4 | 🕸️ | Web | 4×4, 6×6, 9×9 |
| 5 | 🌙 | Moon | 6×6, 9×9 |
| 6 | 🍬 | Candy | 6×6, 9×9 |
| 7 | 🧙 | Witch | 9×9 only |
| 8 | 💀 | Skull | 9×9 only |
| 9 | 🕷️ | Spider | 9×9 only |
Taken from the key above the board, which gives each picture its name and number.
The Witch is 🧙, which Unicode calls “mage”: a figure in a pointed hat holding a staff. Every picture is drawn by your device’s own emoji, so the set looks a little different on an iPhone, an Android phone and a PC. The numbers behind them never change.
The rest of the machinery (the three views, the number of pictures each level starts with and how the boards are made) is shared with our other 20 picture games and explained on Themed Sudoku.
Is Halloween Sudoku too scary for young children?
Not on the small boards. The pictures are cartoon emoji rather than anything gruesome (on our screens the ghost sticks its tongue out and the pumpkin grins), and the skull and the spider never appear below 9×9. A child on 4×4 sees only the pumpkin, ghost, bat and web; 6×6 adds the moon and the candy.
We are grandparents, and this site exists because we wanted our grandchildren to have the pen-and-paper puzzles we grew up with, on the screens they actually use. Here that means a ladder: 4×4 for a child just learning to spot what is missing, 6×6 once that comes easily, and the 9×9, skull and all, for older children and the adults at the table. The same small boards come in plain numbers on our 4x4 Sudoku and 6x6 Sudoku pages, and Sudoku for Kids helps with teaching it, at home and in class.
Which Halloween pictures are easy to mix up?
Before writing this we screenshotted every size on a phone-width Windows screen, in both themes. On 9×9 each picture is about 18 pixels across, and the pair to watch is the ghost and the skull: the only two white tiles, both round heads with two dark eyes. They only meet on 9×9, one more reason the small boards suit small children.
The other one is the web. It is drawn in thin grey lines, and on the cream board of the light theme it is the faintest of the nine. On the dark board it stands out, and so do the ghost and the skull, but there the faint one is the 🕷️ Spider, dark purple on a dark square, which the light board shows clearly. Each theme hides one picture, so if one keeps slipping past you, try the other (the moon button in the header).
If two pictures still blur, switch the display to Both. Every tile gets a small number badge, and the ghost is a 2 where the skull is an 8.
How do you teach a child to solve Halloween sudoku?
With one question: which picture is missing? Pick an empty square, look along its row, down its column and around its box, and name the pictures you find. When three of the four are there, the square is the fourth. That is a naked single, and on a 4×4 board it is the only move a child will ever need: our 4×4 page checked all 13,579,680 4×4 sudokus that have one answer, and naked singles alone finish every one.
The pair below is a real 4×4 Easy deal from this game, in its own pictures. The ringed square in the first needs all three looks; in the second, the bat it gets settles the square below it.
Select any square that holds a picture and every copy of it on the board lights up. For a child asking which picture is missing, that turns a hunt along the row and column into a glance. A wrong picture goes grey on the spot, and the Mistakes counter ticks up by one.
From 6×6 up, a second question joins the first: where can the bat go? Pick a picture and a box that still needs it, and see which squares the bats elsewhere rule out, row by row and column by column. That is a hidden single; there is one drawn on a 6×6 board on the Themed Sudoku page. Older children ready for more can move on to our sudoku strategies for beginners.
Halloween sudoku ideas: an October countdown, parties and paper
Where the Christmas Sudoku page suggests an advent calendar, Halloween gets a countdown: a 4×4 or 6×6 each evening through October makes a good dark-nights routine, with the first 9×9 Hard saved for Halloween night itself.
For a party or a classroom, put one board up where everyone can see it and make solvers defend each move out loud. “Prove the witch belongs there” turns out to be a better party game than it has any right to be, and on 4×4 the same game is the first caption above: the row has the pumpkin, the column the web and the box the ghost, so it is the bat.
We don’t print the pictures, but our printable 4×4 sudoku and printable 6×6 sudoku PDFs use the same numbers as this game’s key, 100 puzzles to a file with the answers at the back and no sign-up. Hand them over with a pencil and let children draw a pumpkin for every 1, a ghost for 2, a bat for 3 and a web for 4, plus a moon for 5 and a candy for 6 on the 6×6 sheets.
Once the pumpkins are composted, Fall Sudoku keeps the season going and Thanksgiving Sudoku is the next holiday on the calendar. For pictures that don’t depend on the date, Emoji Sudoku deals nine emoji on a 9×9 in any month.