Thomas Snyder (aka Dr. Sudoku) is a two-time World Sudoku Champion and five-time US Puzzle Champion, as well as the author of several books of puzzles. His puzzles are hand-crafted, with artistic themes, serving as a kind of “cure for the common sudoku.” Each week he posts a new puzzle on his blog, The Art of Puzzles. This week’s prescription is a themed calcu-doku puzzle where the numbers to enter are unknown.

I’ve played around with calcu-doku puzzles in all sorts of ways (some of which I’ve featured here, others in my book TomTom Puzzles). One of my favorite changes to the standard format is to not always use the digits 1 to N, as new arithmetic combinations and challenges can arise if you don’t limit yourself to small numbers all the time. In this puzzle, six different positive integers have been used to form all the 6 and 10 cages. You need to determine these integers, and then complete the puzzle. Enjoy!

Rules: Place one member of an unknown set of six different positive integers into each cell so that no integer repeats in any row or column. The clues in the upper-left of each bold region indicate the value of the indicated mathematical operation applied to all the numbers in that region. For division and subtraction, start with the largest number (ie, a region with 5, 1, and 2 with subtraction would be evaluated as 5-1-2 = 2).

Pages: Previous 12 | Full Page | Next