[HN Gopher] Show HN: SudokuVariants - play and construct differe...
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       Show HN: SudokuVariants - play and construct different variants of
       Sudoku
        
       Hi HN, I've been working on this Sudoku web app for the past couple
       of years, on and off during free weekends and afternoons. I started
       working on it because I was bored during COVID, and Cracking the
       Cryptic had just become popular on YouTube, which got me wondering
       how hard it could be to make a Sudoku app. The main idea is for the
       app to understand the constraints and know how to solve Sudoku
       grids (and not just be a simple Sudoku drawing/playing app). When
       it comes to classic Sudoku, the solver doesn't support anything
       more complicated than X-Wing, but it understands the constraints.
       At the moment, most of the popular variants are supported: killer,
       sandwich, arrow, thermo, palindrome, German whisper, kropki,
       consecutive, non-consecutive, greater than, XV, diagonal, anti-
       king, anti-knight, even-odd, windoku, renban, and zipper. The only
       variant I am yet to add support for is quadruple. If any other
       variant becomes popular, I will probably add it, as was the case
       with zipper lines during development.  A user account is not
       required to play, but it is required if you want to publish a
       public grid on the app. The app doesn't collect any PII, doesn't
       have ads or trackers. Accounts are identified by email hash; I am
       not storing email addresses or passwords, and OTPs are sent by
       email. The less I know about users, the better for both sides.  The
       app supports mobile devices, but it works best on bigger screens.
       It was built using Blazor SSR/WASM (AOT) with SVG for interactive
       parts. I know there are some performance issues (especially on
       mobile phones and with touch input), and I am trying to address
       them.  Some of the features I was thinking about adding are
       classifying grids by difficulty, daily Sudoku, and maybe campaigns
       (groups of Sudoku grids where users have to solve them in order).
       If you like Sudoku, or more specifically variants of Sudoku, please
       let me know what you think about SudokuVariants.  URL:
       https://sudokuvariants.com  Thanks!
        
       Author : stanac
       Score  : 23 points
       Date   : 2025-01-21 16:49 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (sudokuvariants.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (sudokuvariants.com)
        
       | spencerflem wrote:
       | What a lovely site, and thank you for all the devotion to being
       | user friendly.
       | 
       | You've added something wonderful and artistic to the world, can't
       | wait to try it out more tonight :)
        
         | stanac wrote:
         | Thank you for your kind words.
        
       | jamie_ca wrote:
       | Looks neat.
       | 
       | The CtC community is pretty prolific, and if your colors could
       | match theirs that'd be much easier to parse.
       | https://youtu.be/mkomrpQG388?t=212 has most of them all at once,
       | I think palindrome is the only one missing from there.
       | 
       | Also, if your solver could pick up shift for corner marks and
       | control/command for center marks, that'd be a nice quality of
       | life pickup compared to Sudokupad.
        
         | stanac wrote:
         | Thanks, I was matching colors of another popular Sudoku app.
         | Ultimately it would be best to allow users to configure colors
         | and other presentation attributes (thickness of the line,
         | alpha, dotted/dashed, etc...).
        
         | imglorp wrote:
         | The CtC community sometimes overlaps with, and mentions in
         | their vids, https://www.dailykillersudoku.com/ which also has a
         | nice UX, especially for helping compute totals and possible
         | sum-partitions. Some features might bear imitating/flattering.
        
           | stanac wrote:
           | I didn't know about that one, looks neat. Thanks.
           | 
           | Sums of cages and selected numbers (even outside of
           | killer/sandwich) were a must have feature for me, so I
           | implemented those features early. Also combinations are
           | available for single cage or multiple selected cages and for
           | selected sandwich.
        
             | imglorp wrote:
             | Something I wish DKS did better was Fill. If you have
             | selected a cage and press F, it will fill the cage with all
             | the possible combinations on the right panel. Instead, I
             | think it should take only the ones you haven't ruled out by
             | de-selecting them.
        
           | jandrese wrote:
           | I like it showing you the possibilities when you click on a
           | cell in a cage, but I was really wishing they had a "press
           | shift and the number to set the cell value" feature. I messed
           | myself up a couple of times by unselecting the wrong number
           | when attempting to set the cell and not noticing for a couple
           | of moves. For example, if a 10 cage is a 28 pair and I figure
           | out that the left one is a 2 and the right is an 8, I was
           | clicking on the left and hitting 2, making an error.
           | 
           | If you hold shift while hitting the number it should just set
           | the cell to that number, not just erase a mark.
        
         | NotAnOtter wrote:
         | +1 on matching the CTC 'standards'. You'll get significantly
         | more user adoption if the conventions match.
        
       | LanceH wrote:
       | I wrote a 3d version of sudoku where every slice of a cube was a
       | valid sudoku. It was an awful game. At first it was difficult to
       | wrap your head around the 3d, but once you did it offered so many
       | more clues as to be boring and 95% of the time would be filling
       | out easy cubes.
        
         | spencerflem wrote:
         | Cool experiment though :)
        
         | NotAnOtter wrote:
         | This sounds like a cool one-time solve. Solving high level
         | traditional sudukos is mostly about learning "rules" (like The
         | Phistomefel Ring). I imagine the equivalent in 3d would be too
         | complex for a human to parse.
        
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       (page generated 2025-01-21 23:01 UTC)