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Do you need luck to solve St Patrick’s Day sudoku?
St Patrick’s Day Sudoku covers the grid in the day’s symbols — ☘️ shamrock, 🍀 four-leaf clover, 🌈 rainbow, 🐍 snake, 💰 pot of gold, 🎩 top hat, 🎵 Irish music, 🎻 fiddle and 💚 green heart — and then makes luck useless. It is classic sudoku in pictures: each one turns up once in every row, column and box, and every placement can be proven. Its views, sizes and levels are no different from those of our other 20 picture games, and Themed Sudoku sets them out; what follows is about the charms.
Finding a four-leaf clover in a field is a matter of chance: a 2017 count of about 5.7 million clovers in six European countries turned up one for every 5,076 ordinary three-leaf ones. Finding where the clover belongs on this board never is. The pictures already placed leave it one square, and you can point to the ones that prove it. No board here asks for a guess: each has one answer and is dug so that its level’s own steps finish it. On St Patrick’s Day of all days, the puzzle pays no attention to fortune; even the message at the end, “Lucky solve”, is being modest.
To find the worked example further down, we dealt 2,233 Expert boards from this game. 186 of them, about one in twelve, needed the step the game keeps for Expert, the kind of pair drawn below; the other 2,047 never did. The first with a Shamrock-and-Clover pair that suited this page was number 2,233. Finding it took luck. Solving it takes none.
Shamrock or four-leaf clover: which is which?
The set opens with its own test. The ☘️ Shamrock and the 🍀 Four Leaf Clover are pictures 1 and 2, so both are on every board from 4×4 up, and only a leaf separates them: three against four. They are not the same symbol, either. The shamrock is the day’s own: Saint Patrick, the 5th-century missionary whose feast is 17 March, the traditional date of his death, is said to have used its three leaves to explain the Holy Trinity. The story first appears in writing in 1726, though shamrocks were worn on the day by the 1680s. The four-leaf clover belongs to luck, not to the saint.
In Chrome on Windows 11 at phone width, light or dark, the two are easy on 4×4 and 6×6: three heart-shaped leaves on a long curled stem against four rounder ones. On 9×9, where each picture is about 21 pixels across, they are the pair to watch, two green leaf clusters told apart at a glance by colour as much as by count: the shamrock a yellower green, the clover a bluer one. Other devices draw their own emoji, so yours may differ. If the leaves blur, switch to Both: the Shamrock is 1, the Clover 2.
On a phone’s 9×9 board a note in Pictures view is under 10 pixels, too small to count leaves on. But each picture’s note keeps a fixed place in the square, in key order: the Shamrock’s top left, the Clover’s beside it. In Both, notes are simply the digits.
Where is the gold in St Patrick’s Day sudoku?
Where the leprechaun’s is said to be: at the end of the rainbow. The key under the board sets the order the pictures join in. The 4×4 has the two leaves, the 🌈 Rainbow and the 🐍 Snake; the 💰 Pot of Gold and the 🎩 Top Hat wait for 6×6, the size the game opens on; the 🎵 Irish Music, 🎻 Fiddle and 💚 Green Heart join only on 9×9. So the smallest board shows you the rainbow and keeps back the gold: you follow it through the bigger grids to reach the pot.
One name is generous: Unicode calls 💰 MONEY BAG, and Windows draws a tied gold sack with a dollar sign, not a pot. The 🐍 Snake is the saint’s own legend: he is said to have driven every snake out of Ireland. There were none to drive. Nigel Monaghan, keeper of natural history at the National Museum of Ireland, found no sign of snakes in the island’s fossil record, and after the last Ice Age the rising sea cut Ireland off from Britain before any could cross. Windows draws a teal coil, and in our screenshots, at every size and in both themes, its shape kept it apart from the two leaves. For the youngest, the 4×4 makes the leaf count a counting lesson, and our Sudoku for Kids guide sets out how to teach the rules.
The 🎵 and the 🎻 also play in Music Sudoku, as its Music Note and its Violin; a fiddle is the same instrument under its folk name. And the rainbow has a game to itself, Rainbow Sudoku, whose nine tiles are colours, a green and a gold among them.
How hard does St Patrick’s Day sudoku get?
As hard as a 9×9 Expert board, which starts with 22 to 24 pictures. Hard boards can need locked candidates as well as singles; Expert boards, one step more. Fill in pencil marks (Auto Notes fills them all in one tap), place every single you can, then hunt for two squares of one column or box that share the same two pictures and nothing else. Below, the leaf test returns: you can use the Shamrock and the Clover before you know which is which.
That is a naked pair. Every Expert board here is dug so that singles, locked candidates and naked pairs finish it, so the promise at the top holds on the hardest level too. One rule, every leaf: whatever the size, a finished board has each charm once in every row, column and box, and only one way to get there.