Congrats to Jan Zverina, Hideaki Jo and Jakub Ondrousek for the top-3 players.
Congrats to Prakhar Gupta, Kishore Kumar and Rishi Puri for the top-3 Indian players.

"Good artists copy, great artists steal" - Pablo Picasso.

Few months back, a couple of my friends created some sudoku variants and asked me to test solve them. It was their first try at creating sudokus and they did quite a decent job, since they were all unique. Only problem was, all the variants could be solved like Classics without having to use the variant rule and I had a hearty laugh while solving them. For example, there was an Odd Even Sudoku with 42 givens... a Non-Consecutive Sudoku with 33 givens... etc. :-)

That's how the idea was formed for this test. It was subtle April 'fooling', unlike last year's total surprise (which was awesome in its own way). Thanks to Deb Mohanty and Prasanna Seshadri for test-solving and other inputs and 'contributions'. Incidentally, 13 is my favourite number and this also happens to be the 13th test I'm authoring on LMI. I'm happy many of you were able to complete the test and get the bonus, it was intentionally left longer and the difficulty such that a large portion of solvers would finish.

Thanks for all messages, and hope to see some more exciting Sudoku solving in the months to come! :-)

Turns out to be a bad choice since solving online is much much slower :(

Would anyone told me the password for this test and September test?

LuckyYou, 9CrazyVariants