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.
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Is it soccer or football? The nine Sports Sudoku tiles
Sports Sudoku fields nine sports pictures in place of the digits of classic sudoku: a soccer ball, a basketball, an American football, a baseball, a tennis racket and ball, a trophy, a medal, a goal net and a stadium. Each goes once in every row, column and box. The rulebook for the views and levels, which every picture game on the site shares, is the Themed Sudoku page; here we stick to the line-up.
Settle tile 3 before kick-off. The key calls it Football, and the picture is 🏈, the brown oval that Unicode, the emoji standard, names AMERICAN FOOTBALL. The round ball is tile 1, the ⚽ Soccer Ball, so if your house means the round one by football, the Football here is the other game.
| Picture | Number | First on | Drawn on Windows as |
|---|---|---|---|
| ⚽ Soccer Ball | 1 | 4×4 | a white ball with blue patches |
| 🏀 Basketball | 2 | 4×4 | an orange ball with dark seams |
| 🏈 Football | 3 | 4×4 | a brown oval with white laces |
| ⚾ Baseball | 4 | 4×4 | a white ball with red stitching |
| 🎾 Tennis | 5 | 6×6 | a pink racket, the ball a dot at its tip |
| 🏆 Trophy | 6 | 6×6 | a gold cup on a brown stand |
| 🏅 Medal | 7 | 9×9 | a gold medal with a dark star, on a red, white and blue ribbon |
| 🥅 Goal Net | 8 | 9×9 | a pink goal frame and its net |
| 🏟️ Stadium | 9 | 9×9 | grey stands under a crowd |
The key supplies the names and numbers. The last column is how Chrome on Windows drew each tile in our phone-width screenshots, light theme and dark; other phones have drawings of their own.
The key shortens Unicode’s names: there the 🏈 is AMERICAN FOOTBALL, the 🎾 TENNIS RACQUET AND BALL and the 🏅 SPORTS MEDAL, while the ⚽ really is SOCCER BALL. Of the nine, only the 🎾 appears in another of our games: Dog Sudoku deals it as tile 8, on 9×9 only.
How many balls are in Sports Sudoku?
Four by name, and a 4×4 is nothing but balls: the soccer ball, basketball, football and baseball. The pair you might expect to blur is the soccer ball and the baseball, both round and white. Windows draws them distinctly at every size, even at phone width and in either theme: the soccer ball’s patches are blue and the baseball’s stitching is red. The orange basketball and the oval football are no closer.
A fifth hides in the 🎾 Tennis picture: Windows draws it as a pink racket with the ball a yellow-green dot at its tip, so from 6×6 up, look for a racket.
Why is there no trophy on the 4×4?
Tiles come off the bench in key order, and here the prizes come last. The 4×4 deals four balls and nothing to win; the tennis racket and the 🏆 Trophy, picture 6, arrive at 6×6, where the game starts; the medal, goal net and stadium wait for 9×9. Trophies must be earned, or nearly: finish any board, a 4×4 included, and the “Sports Sudoku Complete!” card has a 🏆 on top. Finish a Hard 9×9 and you have, in the only sense that matters here, filled the stadium.
Stuck on a Hard 9×9? Follow one ball along a row
Hard 9×9 boards here are dug so that singles plus locked candidates finish them. Most never need the second move: of 400 Hard boards we dealt from the game’s own generator for this page, singles alone finished 341. The pair below is one of the other 59, with 42 squares still open. With the singles placed, Auto Notes fills in the pencil marks and puts the Basketball in five squares of the bottom-middle box; striking three of them is your job.
That is box-line reduction, or claiming: when a picture’s places along a row or column all fall in one box, it leaves the rest of that box. Pointing, the other half of locked candidates, runs the opposite way, from a box along a line; Dinosaur Sudoku draws it. Here pointing is not enough: repeated with singles, it places two more pictures and stalls. Of the 59 boards singles could not finish, pointing finished 49; this is one of the 10 that needed the claim. A separate solver confirms it has exactly one answer.
Is sports sudoku good for kids who say they hate puzzles?
This board was half-built for the sports-mad kid who claims to hate puzzles. Frame it as game analysis, not homework: which positions are still open, which tile is forced into this box, prove it before you commit. Those questions are the two moves that carry any small board: a square whose row, column and box leave one tile is a naked single, and a box with one square left for the basketball a hidden single.
For rained-off practice, a 6×6 fits the flat parts of a sporting day: the team bus, the rain delay, the wait between heats, and the game keeps the board in your browser until play resumes. Start younger players on the 4×4’s four balls. Sudoku for Kids covers teaching the rules, and once they call the plays without pictures, 4x4 Sudoku and 6x6 Sudoku are the number versions.
Is sudoku a sport?
Not at the Olympics, but it has a world championship with individual and team titles, first held in Lucca, Italy, in 2006. The stakes here are lower: every board has exactly one answer and no tile twice in any row, column or box, so no rematches and no disputed calls. When the last picture goes in, that is full time.
For pictures with no sport or season attached, Emoji Sudoku and Symbol Sudoku deal one set of nine all year.