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.
Spring sudoku with pictures: what grows on the board?
Spring Sudoku is classic sudoku planted with nine pictures from the garden and its weather: the blossom, butterfly, bee, tulip, spring rain, seedling, ladybug, sunshine and rainbow. Each picture stands for a number, and on a finished board every row, column and box has each one exactly once. The Themed Sudoku page is the garden shed: the views, the levels, Hint and Notes, kept in one place for all 21 of our picture games.
The garden grows with the board, because the game deals the first four, six or nine pictures of the set. The 4×4 is a flowerbed already in bloom: blossom, butterfly, bee and tulip. At 6×6, the board you meet first, the weather turns and the work starts: the spring rain arrives and the seedling goes in. The full 9×9 brings the ladybug, the sunshine at last and, with sun and rain on the same board, a rainbow. Play the sizes in order and the set tells the season.
The Sunshine is picture 8, so it never appears below the full 9×9. Gardeners will confirm this is realistic. Summer Sudoku deals the same ☀️ as its picture 1, the Sun, on every board from 4×4 up.
One of the pictures is worth naming for a child. The Spring Rain is ☔, which Unicode calls an umbrella with rain drops, so look for the umbrella, not a cloud: in Chrome on Windows, a purple umbrella with blue drops. Other phones draw their own emoji, so check yours against the key.
How do you solve spring sudoku? Ask what a square can be
Two questions find a picture. The first, drawn on the Themed Sudoku page, starts from a picture: where can it go? The second starts from a square instead. Scan its row, its column and its box and name the pictures already there. On a 6×6, if five of the six are taken, the square is the sixth. That is a naked single, and it is how a garden grows: every picture you plant leaves the squares around it fewer choices.
The Seedling in R6C2 is a square-first find. Ask where the Seedling goes, the picture-first hidden single, and row 6, column 2 and the bottom-left box each still offer it three squares. All three looks are needed, too: any two of them leave two or more pictures possible. An independent count finds one answer, and all fourteen empty squares fall to singles.
Press Auto Notes and every empty square fills with its pencil marks, the pictures it could still hold: drawn small in Pictures view, as their numbers in Both. On the board above, R6C6 shows the Bee and the Seedling, 3 and 6. Plant the Seedling in R6C2 and the game wipes the Seedling from the notes of every square in its row, column and box, so R6C6 is left with the Bee. A wrong picture wipes nothing: it turns grey and counts a mistake, and Undo takes it out again. We loaded this board into the game in Chrome to check each step.
On a 6×6 Easy board, the square-first question alone is enough. We dealt 200 of them from the game’s own generator and asked only what each square could be: that finished all 200, and on 150 of them, three in four, the board as dealt had a square like R6C2 that the picture-first question could not yet see. On 6×6 Expert it finished 174 of 200; the other 26 need the picture-first question as well, so it pays to ask both.
Spring sudoku for the whole season, not just Easter
No eggs, no bunnies, no baskets: those live on our Easter Sudoku board, and go back in the cupboard after the long weekend. This one covers the whole stretch from the first warm day to the last frost warning. Three pictures grow in both gardens: the Blossom, the Butterfly and the Tulip. Here all three bloom on the 4×4; Easter holds the Butterfly back to 6×6 and the Blossom to 9×9. The Tulip alone keeps its number, 4, in both games, so anyone playing in Numbers or Both should check the key when switching between them.
Spring doesn’t keep one date, either. South of the equator, from Australia to Argentina, it runs from September to November, and Easter, which Western churches keep between 22 March and 25 April, falls in autumn. Nothing on this board is tied to the calendar, so it is in season whenever spring reaches you.
Spring sudoku for gardeners, and for the youngest solvers
Spring gardening is mostly waiting: you sow, you water, and then nothing visible happens for a fortnight. A 6×6 fills that gap honestly; it is progress you can watch. The 9×9 is for wet afternoons, and its Hard and Expert boards can ask for more than singles.
For a young child, start on 4×4, where only the Blossom, Butterfly, Bee and Tulip play. There are two flowers on that board, and the Tulip is the one with the stem; the Blossom is a flat, open flower. If they still trade places on a small screen, switch to Both and each picture carries its number, the Blossom 1 and the Tulip 4. To teach the rules at home, see Sudoku for Kids; once the flowers have done their job, the jump to digits is 4x4 Sudoku, then 6x6 Sudoku.
Whatever the season, the rules are perennial: every board has exactly one answer, and nothing blooms twice in a row, column or box.