Whether you’re tackling Color Cube Sudoku alone or with partners, whether you’re trying to crack a regular 6×6 pattern or taking a whack at some of the variant challenges they suggest - like knight’s paths and other difficult patterns - this is a deduction puzzle that feels like play instead of work. Which means you’re preventing wasted moves and pushing closer to an actual solution. Since that’s impossible, even without placing the third cube, you know you need to change one of the two you’ve already placed. Once you’ve placed a few of the cubes, next-level deductive reasoning kicks in, and you can eliminate certain possibilities and begin working more than one step ahead at a time.įor instance, if you’ve placed two cubes in a column, you’ll know you need to change one of the cubes if the third cube will need a green spot in both columns. What once seemed simple now offers a greater challenge.īut, like many ThinkFun puzzle-games, the more you play around with the possibilities, the more you begin developing new strategies and get into the psychology of the puzzle itself. Which means, instead of needing a new cube, you need to change one of the cubes you’ve already placed and try again. If you need a blue square in the first row, sixth column, given the cubes available to you, you might end up with a second yellow square in your row. Unlike a pen-and-paper puzzle, where you can place any number (or in this case, any color) in any square you choose, the preset color arrangements on each cube limit your choices.
And it’s up to you to arrange the nine cubes in the grid in a 3×3 pattern so that each color only appears once in each row and column.īut that arrangement already introduces complications. Each cube has four of the six possible colors: green, red, blue, yellow, orange, and white. You’ve got a tray and nine multi-colored cubes. ThinkFun has upped the ante with Color Cube Sudoku, their latest puzzle-game, by combining the twisty-turny cube possibilities of a Rubik’s Cube with Sudoku-style deductive solving. In Color Sudoku, you have nine colors to arrange instead of numbers. It’s found in numerous daily newspapers, puzzle books, and smartphone apps.Īfter years of tackling regular Sudoku, Extreme Sudoku, Word Sudoku, Mega Sudoku, Samurai Sudoku, Geometric Sudoku, Sum-Doku, and numerous other variations, you’d think the puzzle community at large would’ve exhausted every possible version of Sudoku.Įnter the crafty folks at ThinkFun, who have put a unique spin on another Sudoku variant: Color Sudoku. It cannot sustain a candidate for digit 3.Sudoku is one of the most popular pen-and-paper puzzles in the world. There is no middle ground in which some blue cells and some green cells contain digit 3.Ĭell r2c6 can see both colors. Now either all blue cells must contain digit 3 or all green cells.
Notice that row 9, column 9 and box 9 all have 2 candidates for digit 3, which now have opposite colors. In the example, green and blue colors have been applied. We can use colors to help us remember which candidates must be true or false simultaneously. In coloring terminology, these candidates form a conjugate pair. When a row, column or box contains only 2 candidates for a digit, one of them must be true and the other must be false. The following example demonstrates the principle:Īll the candidates for digit 3 are highlighted. Together with the Color Wrap, this technique belongs to the Simple Colors. Color Trap is a type of coloring that uses a single cluster with only 2 colors to perform eliminations outside this cluster.
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