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 deals with Tetris Sudoku, a sudoku variation that involves fitting a set of tetrominoes into the grid much like the computer game Tetris.
For this week's puzzle prescription, I thought I'd revisit one of my favorite ideas from the past year, which was the last puzzle in my book Sudoku Masterpieces, co-written with Wei-Hwa Huang. While brainstorming new ideas for that book, I really wanted to create a kind of jigsaw/sudoku hybrid where figuring out how to fit together a set of small pieces would build the solution. The result was Tetris Sudoku, and I've written a fresh version of this style for today's puzzle. And for those counting at home, this is now my 12th smiley face puzzle, a theme I use way too often, but then this is Thanksgiving and there is a lot to be happy about. Enjoy!
Rules: A set of labeled tetrominoes is given below a sudoku grid. These represent a set of pieces that must be placed into the grid in order, falling from above the top of the grid and making down/left/right movements as well as rotations to fit into place, in a similar fashion to the computer game Tetris. The pieces will never extend beyond the left or right boundaries of the grid. After all tetrominoes are placed, the grid will be completely full with no empty cells and will form a valid sudoku solution, meaning the digits 1 to 9 will appear a single time in each row, column, and bold region.
