We did a post-test analysis of Top finishers' timings and found that skyscrapers were undervalued and classics overvalued by about 3-4 points. This is primarily due to our testers being relatively stronger at skyscrapers and relatively weaker at classics. This was a known fact and was adjusted for, but still the variation proved to be high enough in the end. Timings for all other variants roughly followed the points distribution pattern outlined in the IB.

What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
Which set of puzzles did you like the most?	Renban Sudoku
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount

Very nice test. Enjoyed this test a lot. Some of the Sudoku variations required good logical flow which was really nice.

Solution Booklet is available now.

Also Puzzle Booklet (without password) can now be downloaded from the contest page.

I would like to thank LMI for giving me the opportunity to co-author this round of SM contest alongside Rakesh. It was a great learning experience for me while creating Sudokus (both classics and variants) for the contest and I thoroughly enjoyed doing so.

Thanks to all the solvers for participating and providing their honest feedback on the grids. Although we got lot of mixed feedback, we will definitely work upon to improve the contents in future.

I know every solver has his/her personal liking which was obvious from the feedback but my personal favorites were Outside Sequence (9x9), Skyscraper (9x9) and 2-5-8 Outside (9x9) Sudokus.

Last but not the least, I would like to thank Rakesh for all the support and guidance provided by him to accomplish the task.

Thanks Ramesh for being the major contributor to the set, and Prasanna for testing the puzzles. I contributed Outside Sequence and Consecutive Pairs, and was aiming for approachable level of difficulty to balance out the set. Both the 6x6s were gentle ones and the 9x9s were moderate.

Classics and 6x6s did not have high points, all were easy to moderate. The Skyscraper 9x9 was one sudoku which solves logically but takes time also. A majority of the participants did spend a lot of time on this, some either breaking the sudoku or parking it for later. Thermo 9x9 proved to be a tricky one as we had some participants who just breezed through it as also others who spent 30+ minutes on it. Most of the top solvers did outside sequence 9x9 quickly, but some of them got stuck here too, perhaps, due to the variant being relatively new (introduced in WSC2017). 258 Outside was again new but similar logic/concept has been seen earlier in normal outside sudoku and 234 outside sudoku. Ramesh was able to come up with a grid which was not trivial and needed different pieces of logic. The other two - Renban 9x9 and consecutive pairs 9x9 were relatively easy with multiple starting points. As authors, we are satisfied with the overall set, although we knew that it is a bit on the harder side. Also, it was also interesting to observe different competitors finding different sudokus tougher.

Of course, we missed out on some top participants due to the contest ending earlier than anticipated. Some of the highlights of the test from our perspective -
(1) Tomasz Skalski finishing with 70 points, the first competitor on the scoreboard. Reassured us that PB is fine!
(2) Sinchai finishing the set, the first to do so, we waited a while for this!
(3) Kota finishing the set in less than 59 minutes, amazing!
(4) Rohan finishing the set with 7 seconds to spare, that was a tight finish!

On to the next test now.

What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many hard puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Fairly Nice
Which set of puzzles did you like the most?	Consecutive Pairs Sudoku
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Many puzzles were worth too much or too little