Winter Sudoku

What is Winter Sudoku?

Winter Sudoku brings nine cold-weather pictures to a classic sudoku grid: snowflake, snowman, mitten, scarf, sled, ice skate, hot drink, evergreen and mountain. Each appears once in every row, column and box. The season changes; the rule doesn’t. How the Pictures, Numbers and Both views work, and what each level starts you with, is set out on our themed sudoku page, alongside the other 20 games.

It is not the Christmas board, on purpose. Christmas Sudoku has a short season; this one is for the long part of winter, with no Santa, no gift and nothing that looks out of place in the grey first week of February. The two sets share a single picture, the ❄️ Snowflake (6 on the Christmas key, 1 here), and the tree has lost its decorations: the Christmas game’s 🎄 Tree is the plain 🌲 Evergreen here. New Year’s Sudoku has the countdown on the 31st; from January on, this is the board. And it works whenever winter happens to fall, so in the southern hemisphere it is a July puzzle.

Snowman, mitten, sled: what does each board size add?

Each bigger board adds pictures in a fixed order, and this set dresses in layers, like someone getting ready to go out in the cold:

Names and numbers come from the key above the board, and the numbers are the ones you see in the Numbers and Both views. A 6×6 deals the first six pictures, a 9×9 all nine.

So the hot drink only turns up once you take on the biggest board, which feels about right. The house rule at our table: one finished 9×9 earns one real hot chocolate, and the level sets the number of marshmallows. The Scarf and the Hot Drink also come round in Fall Sudoku, where they are 8 and 9, so read the key if you switch games in Numbers view.

On a phone the nine are easy to tell apart. Across every board size, phone-width on Windows and in either theme, the woolly pair never blurred: Windows draws the Mitten as a purple glove and the Scarf in pink and red. It is a glove because the Mitten is the emoji Unicode calls GLOVES, fingers and all, so a child who says “glove” is right. The picture that needs explaining is the Snowman, who wears a blue scarf of his own; that scarf is part of the snowman, not the Scarf tile. Another phone draws all nine its own way, but the numbers stay put: the Mitten is always 3 and the Scarf 4.

Where do you start on Expert when no square is obvious?

Expert deals the fewest pictures: 12 on a 6×6 board, against 22 on Easy. That changes where you look more than what you need to know. With fewer pictures around it, a square has fewer ruled out, so squares with only one picture left, the usual way in, are scarce. On the board below there are none.

Both moves are hidden singles: instead of asking what goes in a square, you pick a picture and ask where it can go. The themed sudoku page draws the same move in a box of an Easy board, where the square could hold three pictures; here R2C2 could hold five. Ten fewer pictures leave every square more open, as the counts below show. If you keep pencil marks, Auto Notes fills R2C2 with five of them and gives no hint which is right. The box does.

What can you play on a snow day?

This board earns its keep on the days winter cancels everything else: snow days, sick days home from school, and the long dark evenings after the decorations come down. It is a snow day that needs no snow, and even the Snowman is the emoji Unicode calls SNOWMAN WITHOUT SNOW. A 6×6 by the window while it sleets asks nothing of anyone except the one rule, and the board waits in your browser, and a puzzle left for the sledging is still there when the gloves come off. Finish it and the game signs off with “Fresh tracks.”

For the youngest, the 4×4 deals only the snowflake, the snowman, the mitten and the scarf. Sudoku for Kids has a way to teach the rule at home, and once a child would rather count than look, 4x4 Sudoku swaps the pictures for 1 to 4.