Games like Sudoku: a new kind of grid to solve

What makes Sudoku satisfying isn't the numbers. It's the feeling of narrowing things down until only one answer is left. If you want that feeling in a fresh form, here are puzzles that keep it, starting with a tiny one you can try right here.

What Sudoku players will feel at home with

A good Sudoku has one solution, and you never have to guess to find it. Every number you write is something you proved. That's the part worth looking for in another puzzle:

• Pure deduction, with one solution and no luck.
• Candidates you cross out, like the small pencil marks in a Sudoku square.
• The same few techniques that carry over from one puzzle to the next.
• A new puzzle to come back to, at a level that suits you.

Puzzles like Sudoku, side by side

Hence

A daily picture logic puzzle, free in any browser. The board has a row for each kind of picture (monsters, hats, sweets and so on), and each picture goes in exactly one column, the way each digit goes once in a Sudoku row. Instead of givens, there are small picture clues: these two share a column, this one is next to that one, this one is somewhere to the left. You use them to cross candidates out of squares until only one is left, which is Sudoku's pencil marks in another form. There's no math at all. A 4x4 takes a couple of minutes and a 6x6 is a longer think, and they get harder from Monday to Sunday.

Mini Sudoku

LinkedIn's daily 6x6 Sudoku, added to its games in August 2025: the same rules on a smaller grid, a couple of minutes a day, easiest on Monday. If what you want is Sudoku itself, only shorter, this is it.

Killer Sudoku

Ordinary Sudoku rules, plus dotted cages over groups of squares, each with the total its digits must add up to. Often there are no starting digits at all: the sums are the clues. A good next step if you like Sudoku and don't mind a little addition.

KenKen

Invented by the Japanese math teacher Tetsuya Miyamoto. Each digit appears once in every row and column, and cages give a target number and an operation, so the logic runs through arithmetic. Pick it if you like numbers as much as the deduction.

The techniques you already know

Two of the most useful Sudoku techniques work on a Hence board exactly as they do on a Sudoku. The first is the naked pair: two squares that can only hold the same two things use them up between them.

Before

→

After

The second is the hidden single: when only one square in a row can still hold something, it goes there, however many other candidates that square shows.

Before

→

After

Hence adds clues that Sudoku doesn't have, like next to, between and somewhere to the left. They're explained with examples in how to solve logic puzzles.