A very good set of Sudokus. Though I am not good at solving regular Sudoku's, at first I thought of not giving the test, but since this is the first test of 2012 I decided to give, now I am saying that I am looking forward for another one.
I had a lot of trouble in starting off with the Toroidal Sudoku, even though it is the one with lowest points (which I think is an easier one), then I left it and went for Toroidal in Large Grid and it went smoothly and finally caught the trick in Toroidal sudoku to complete it.
I liked Toroidal concept a lot.

Thanks to Richard and LMI for the wonderful contest.

Regards,
Ravi

Is it possible to color the chains in Chain Sudoku for the future tests?
I had a lot of trouble in solving the example and could not keep track of chains, but the test was already started and I do not want to raise any unnecessary concerns.
I also see that no one has raised this concern, so is it something only I had trouble with or do I need to follow any rule or something to work with these kind of variations ?

Please let me know.

Regards,
Ravi

Using colors other than shades of grey is not allowed in LMI tests. Not everyone has access to color printer.

Players who solved Chain Sudoku should be able to tell you how they kept track of chains.

I found the entire set highly enjoyable. Specially liked scattered non-consecutiive and Cylindrical. This is coming from someone who generally hates Irregular Sudokus. :P

It was a tough set. Initially, I was just switching from one sudoku to another, trying to get something sturdy going. Luckily, I was able to return and finish off all my half-solves except non-consecutive. Can someone solve the first few numbers (around 8-10) logically?

Talking about favourite sudokus, Low Digits was incredible. It was like 'Wow, this can't get better' after I solved it. It was beautiful. No wonder it's average rating is 9.5 from 10 votes.

I avoided the Toroidals for as long as I could, but eventually, I ran out of choices. I wasted some time on Windoku and Non-Consecutive, and missed out on the latter. But, overall, its been a good start of the year. Lets hope it gets better with every test.

Thanks for the test Richard. I'm sure many players would improve in Irregular variants after this test.

I didn't solve it during the test, but I did it quite quickly later considering the points value. My initial steps included getting the possibilities for the 0s, the 2s, getting the 2 diagonally touching 1s in the two middle rows, and figuring out that there have to be 2 1s in either of the boxes at R2C2,R9C2,R2C9,R9C9. My first digits entered were mostly using the middle regions and not the corner regions though, and mainly I could narrow it down a lot in the middle bottom region. I guess you'll be able to do that since thats the least confusing part and all the extra cells are clustered away from the middle regions.

I will post the first part of the walkthrough for this mean puzzle tonight, when I am home.
It is the highest points puzzle, compared to size, which is the reason that it has a bit of a tough start.

OK Here it is: R5C5 = 1 R6C6 = 1 R8+R10C5 = 07 7 in C2 locked in R1 or R3 R5C3 = 7 R8+R10C6 = 29 R7C6 + R6C7 = 35 6 in R6 locked in C135 R6C5 = 6 R5C1 = 5 R7C5 = 3 R7C6 = 5 R6C7 = 3 R6C10 = 2 R6C8 = 5 R6C3 = 0 R3C5 = 2 From here it should run smoothly.

I noticed the very high rating. Although I am very happy with the ratings of all puzzles, I wonder why especially this one is by far the highest. Is it the shapes of the irregular areas? Or the straight forward solving path? I am very fond of symmetry, in shapes, grey cells and patterns of given digits. The fun part is that this is the only puzzle where symmetry is not possible in the grey cells.