Sudoku Difficulty Levels

Magnetic Travel Sudoku

Price: $15*
(Brookstone)

Magnetic Travel Sudoku"”this game of wits keeps you engrossed wherever you go.With the tin case as your game board, you can keep your magnetic game pieces in place and never lose them. Features 16 pre-made game puzzles with solutions at four different challenge levels.

Merchant: Brookstone

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Difficulty ratings

Published puzzles often are ranked in terms of difficulty. Surprisingly, the number of givens has little or no bearing on a puzzle's difficulty. A puzzle with a minimum number of givens may be very easy to solve, and a puzzle with more than the average number of givens can still be extremely difficult to solve. The difficulty of a puzzle is based on the relevance and the positioning of the given numbers rather than the quantity of the numbers.

Computer solvers can estimate the difficulty for a human to find the solution, based on the complexity of the solving techniques required. This estimation allows publishers to tailor their Sudoku puzzles to audiences of varied solving experience. Some online versions offer several difficulty levels.

Most publications sort their Sudoku puzzles into four rating levels, although the actual cut-off points of the levels and indeed the names of the levels themselves can vary widely. Typically, however, the titles are some set of synonyms of "easy", "intermediate", "hard", and "challenging".