A Bit Puzzling

Hubby and I both like doing Suduko puzzles, so it came as no surprise that this was one of the rare £10 dash duplications in 32 Christmases together.
Image: Free from google

The number of puzzles vary per book, but there are always levels of difficulty, some ranging 1 to 3, others 1 to 5.
Neither of us are any good at the hardest level 5, I’ve had limited success with some level 4, and more success with level 3 than Hubby.
The book I bought for him was completed as far as we could go at the end of February, so we are now on the one he bought for me.

Ah.
We are trying level one, supposedly the easiest and the majority in the book, and they are HARD!!! Every single one we have attempted has ended in failure and we’ve had to check the answer or start again. Grrrr!!!

Deciding to be clever, we attempted one of the other levels and still had no success at all! I was beginning to wonder if it was a joke book and unsolvable as on some you really get going then come to an abrupt halt and discover you’ve gone wrong somewhere with missing numbers impossible to place or duplicated numbers in a row or box.

There are three levels in this book compared to five in the little ones I buy for about £3. Thinking outside the box I’ve done some counting on another level.

In the easier book, levels one and two puzzles have 25 to 28 numbers in place, level three 20 to 24, level four 20 ish and level five round 18, but they are all doable with time, thought and concentration. The example above has 35 by the way.

The hard book we’re trying now has 19 to 23 on level one, 22 to 24 on level 2, and 20 to 24 on level 3, so they are all equally hard and it’s not as if they’ve printed the book in the wrong order either!

Ho hum.

In case anyone is interested, I’ll provide my own solution to the example in a post later.