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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Thanksgiving Sudoku: a puzzle for the long wait before dinner
Thanksgiving Sudoku is classic sudoku dealt in the holiday’s pictures: turkey, pumpkin pie, corn, pumpkin, apple, bread, fork and knife, fallen leaf and hot drink. Every row, column and box takes each picture once. The rules, the three views and what each level asks of you don’t change between our 21 picture games, so they are carved just once, on the Themed Sudoku page.
The defining feature of Thanksgiving Day is the wait: hours of it, with the kitchen off-limits and everyone slightly underfoot. That is the gap this board was made for. The kids’ table can hold a tournament of 4×4s with nothing to spill or lose, a 6×6 fits between bastings, and the after-dinner stretch, when nobody can move but nobody wants to sleep yet, is the right size for a slow 9×9.
We are grandparents, and we built these picture boards so a small child and a grandparent could share one puzzle. Thanksgiving suits them best: the whole family in one house and nothing to do until the turkey is carved. In the United States that is the fourth Thursday of November, in Canada the second Monday of October, and the pictures fit either table.
Which pictures are in Thanksgiving Sudoku?
Nine, and they come to the table in key order, a few more with each size. The 4×4 uses the first four, the 6×6 adds the apple and the bread, and the fork and knife, fallen leaf and hot drink wait for the 9×9. The order has one joke a cook will appreciate: the pie arrives second, right behind the turkey, and the hot drink comes last.
Four of the nine, the turkey, the pie, the bread and the fork and knife, are in no other game among our 21 themes. The other five belong to the season, and Fall Sudoku has all of them; it trades the dinner for a maple leaf, an acorn, a mushroom and a scarf.
| Picture | Number | First on | Also in |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🦃 Turkey | 1 | 4×4 | — |
| 🥧 Pumpkin Pie | 2 | 4×4 | — |
| 🌽 Corn | 3 | 4×4 | Fall, Cinco de Mayo |
| 🎃 Pumpkin | 4 | 4×4 | Fall, Halloween |
| 🍎 Apple | 5 | 6×6 | Fall, Food |
| 🍞 Bread | 6 | 6×6 | — |
| 🍴 Fork and Knife | 7 | 9×9 | — |
| 🍂 Fallen Leaf | 8 | 9×9 | Fall |
| ☕ Hot Drink | 9 | 9×9 | Fall, Winter |
The key above the board gives these names, numbers and order, and lists only the pictures in play; each number is the digit in Numbers view and the corner badge in Both. “Also in” is every other themed game here that uses the same picture.
Two of the names are generous. Unicode’s 🥧 is simply named PIE; the key says Pumpkin Pie, and your table can call it pecan. The Pumpkin is a jack-o’-lantern, carved grin and all (🎃 is named JACK-O-LANTERN), the same picture that opens the Halloween game in October and takes the dinner shift in November.
Which Thanksgiving pictures look alike on a phone?
The tiles are emoji, so an iPhone, an Android phone and a Windows computer each draw every tile differently. What follows is what we saw in Chrome on Windows and in Noto Color Emoji, the set on Google’s Pixel phones. An iPhone’s drawings differ again.
We looked at all nine at the size a 9×9 board gives them on a phone, in both sets, on light and dark squares. The pair to watch is the Apple and the Pumpkin: both round, both red to orange, both with a green stem on top. The carved face is the surest way to tell them apart, and on a 9×9 phone board that face is small. The two first share a board on 6×6, which is where the game opens.
The pie and the pumpkin are not a pair in either set: the pie is a pale or golden crust in a tin, nothing like a carved orange face. The 4×4’s four, turkey, pie, corn and pumpkin, have no look-alike among them.
If the pair catches you out, turn on Both and go by the corner numbers: the Pumpkin is 4 and the Apple 5. On 9×9 keep your notes in Both too: in Pictures, pencil marks are tiny pictures, up to nine to a square; in Both they are digits.
Measured on this page in Chrome, in a phone browser 390 pixels wide (an iPhone 14’s width): a 4×4 square is 78 pixels across with a 29-pixel picture, a 6×6 square 52 with a 25-pixel picture, and a 9×9 square 34 with a 21-pixel picture. A pencil mark is under 10. On a 1280-pixel laptop screen the same 9×9 picture is 35.
Worked example: is it the apple or the pumpkin?
Here is that mix-up on a real board, a 9×9 Easy deal from the game itself. The ringed square needs one picture, and the move that finds it is a naked single: when a square’s row, column and box between them show eight different pictures, the ninth is its answer.
All three have to be read: the row holds three pictures, the column adds four and the box the last one. Put a Pumpkin in R1C6 and the game counts a mistake. Our own solver, run apart from the game, confirms the board has only one answer. The other everyday move, the hidden single, is drawn in Christmas pictures on the Themed Sudoku page.
Thanksgiving Sudoku for kids, families and classrooms
For the youngest, start on 4×4, where only the turkey, pie, corn and pumpkin play. A child who can finish those is ready for 6×6, which adds the apple and the bread. Sudoku for Kids teaches the rules step by step, with ideas for the classroom, and 4x4 Sudoku and 6x6 Sudoku serve the same small boards without the feast, in plain numbers.
Whoever places the last picture of a puzzle says one thing they are grateful for. Corny? Completely. It is Thanksgiving.
There is no printable Thanksgiving sheet here. For a class or a kids’ table that wants paper, our printable 4×4 and 6×6 PDFs hold 100 number puzzles each, with answers. After dinner, the 9×9 Hard and Expert boards can call for more than singles; pencil marks are the way in, and which steps each level allows is listed on the Themed Sudoku page.