The sudoku games are great - a good way to engage in friendly competitions while working out the brain.

But a handful of people, especially recently, are noticing some things that don't make sense. I'll cover those.


Question 1: Why are there nearly always multiple solutions for this event?
It's been confirmed that a generator is used to create these puzzles. While there's nothing directly wrong with that, the issue is that it creates a non-official puzzle. Again, nothing exactly wrong there. However, it can lead to incomplete clues, which produces a multi-solution puzzle. This is where the problems start.

This Festival's puzzle comes with twenty-two initial clues, a decent handful. According to many studies and some equations, puzzles with sixteen clues or less are mathematically required to have more than one solution, which definitely doesn't apply here. But due to the number(s) not given and the arrangement of the starting clues from the generator, here we are with at least two solutions.

Technically speaking, a multi-solution puzzle with plenty of hints usually isn't considered a "true" sudoku. In this case, I personally like to call the event Seashell Scramble to avoid confusing myself. But that's just my process.

It was stated by Faiona that the puzzles she plays almost always have multiple solutions, in which case Fai is either a mastermind at wild sudokus (wouldn't surprise me) or the sudokus she's being given aren't officially made.

Question 2: So what's wrong with multiple solutions?
Honestly? Nothing, unless you're a sudoku purist. I think it just makes everything a bit inconvenient for those participating, including the admins. Having more than one solution confuses players (again, "true" sudokus should have only one solution with enough hints) and can completely demotivate them from playing, and it forces the admins checking the submitted solutions to compare several answers, taking them much longer than it could than a single correct answer. Especially when you consider the fact that it uses icons and not numbers, it's visually harder to compare (at least in my case).

It would be great if there could even be a "multiple solution" disclaimer - the admins know and have admitted that this puzzle (and assumedly most others here) has more than one solution, but don't disclose that info until people publicly display their confusion. Simply saying the puzzle "may be difficult, but it is possible and it does have a proper answer" implies that it only has one solution that's just hard to find. Likewise, saying that "Sudokus usually always have multiple correct solutions" rubs me the wrong way (again, just my thought) because it's quite incorrect, or at least should be if you're playing actual sudokus.

TL;DR: Could be worse. Could be better. I think people would like it if the puzzles we're given had only one solution.

I support! I went through a bit of a sudoku phase when I was younger, just running through physical sudoku puzzle books constantly. I know all of those only ever had one solution (as the answer key in the back would demonstrate).

Having multiple solutions also artificially increases the difficulty of the puzzle by requiring you to brute force it in certain sections rather than using logic strategies to find the answer. Brute forcing just takes longer and is much more frustrating. It's not bad to have a difficult puzzle, I'm all for it being hard! But, I think it should be properly difficult in that it requires advanced techniques to solve rather than just brute forcing your way through the puzzle. The logic is the fun part of sudoku ;)

I also know it's been mentioned to Krin already, but I wanted to add it here as well, that it would be nice for a psd to be provided for the puzzle. It's already a bit inconvenient to use the images instead of numbers (tho I think the theming is fun and part of the charm!) and having a psd with all the images in separate layers would make it less annoying to play.