Hi all,
As Minyoung Joo already mentioned
here, Arvid Baars and I have created a new Sudoku Advent Calender. This time we have chosen to write 24 puzzles that have a combination of two variants in each puzzle. Each day we combine a very well known variant with a less known type. While writing the puzzles we realised there are three ways to make progress in such combination puzzles:
1. normal sudoku rules
2. eliminations or placements forced by one of the two variants
3. eliminations or placements forced by the combination of the two variants.
Some of the puzzles in the series contain one or more solving steps in the thrid category; this makes them very interesting puzzles in our opinion. Because those steps may be a bit hard to find, we have written some solving hints for each of the puzzles. Those hints are written in a very tiny font, so you don't need to read them if you don't want to. Otherwise you can copy them into a text editor and enlarge the font size.
We hope that players will enjoy the puzzles as much as we did writing them!
I'll provide links to the puzzles in this thread every few days.
Here is the first puzzle:
Search nine vs. Rossini