Thanks for a wonderful contest Rakesh .Monthly contests are a rarity nowadays and it was a pleasant sight to see a sudoku contest aside from the routine of SM & PRs. This contest made me reminescent of ISC 2016?! wherein Round 4 (authored by Deb)had 6x6 sudokus with unknown list of digits in which I scored 43 and you 133 (if I am not wrong and my memory is good.I am unable to get the result list for the same to verify) and you edged ahead of me to podium.

I would be curious to know your inspiration for writing this test and whether you got the idea by the above mentioned round.About the contest itself, the sudokus were definitely on the harder side and will be extremely fun to solve as one-offs without contest time constraints or pressure. In the contest, I had to guess on most but I did find logic in a few and they were very interesting. Thanks again ! Hope we get to see more monthly contests in LMI !

It is displayed on the screen once you start the contest. It seems you already took the test. So you would be knowing this already.

Very interesting set of puzzles. It was certainly very challenging trying to find out the digits by solving , but made it more fun too. i wish I was less sleepy and had a printer since I took time solving online. Thanks for a very innovative contest.

Those puzzles were really hard, but very fun! I wish I had had more time, but I enjoyed solving what I could in the time allotted. Thanks very much Rakesh!

Thanks Rakesh for Mean Minis! They were a wonderful set of moderate to hard puzzles with very interesting solving paths. Thoroughly enjoyed.

The Solution Booklet is now available here.

Congratulations to Nikola Zivanovic for winning this contest by a mile. Congratulations to Endo Ken, Prasanna Seshadri, Tiit Vunk, Salih Alan and Tantan Dai for completing all 18 grids inside 70 minutes. In fact, all 15 finishers did very well. Amongst competitors from India, Good performances by Kishore, Pranav, Harmeet and Kartik.

Thanks Rob, Byron, Ashish, Bob, Tiit, Tawan, Kishore, Anu G, Michael and Harmeet for sharing feedback on the test! Also, thanks to all the 246 participants for trying out this test.

The concept of the test was indeed taken from one of the rounds in ISC 2016. I had liked this concept very much at that time.

I knew before the test that there could be a fair amount of guesswork in play - owing to the moderate/hard logic and 6x6 nature. That is one reason I increased the number of grids from (initially planned) 15 to 18. After having watched live streams of Puzzle GP and Sudoku GP finals in recent years, I can say that every contest involves some amount of guesswork. And, even when one says he/she guessed, I think it is a combinaton of x% logic and y% guess. And, as long as x is a decent number, it is fine. At the same time, I was not too worried about this aspect - specifically I did not think about things like "Can this one be resolved by guessing easily?" while creating the grids.

I am not surprised that Inequality Sudoku was solved the most. That would probably be a first for this type, as this is a not-so-popular variant in general. Little Killer and Odd Even Count had the least correct submissions. However, both fared exactly opposite of each other in terms of accuracy of submissions. Expectedly, there were many submission errors in Odd Even Count Sudoku due to the 12-21 twist in the end. No one made an error in LK submission. In the test, I would have liked to include mini classic sudoku and more common variants like diagonal, palindrome, extra region, etc. But they would have needed all six digits to be provided, so they were excluded.

Based on the comments, there may be a second edition of Mean Minis coming soon - with a different set of 18 variants.

I wasn't able to find time to attempt this during the contest, but I've worked through the full set on my own time since. I usually sit out on sudoku contests, but the theme here piqued my interest enough and I'm very glad I solved these. My favorite paths were the Little Killer and X Sums, though I also loved placing all copies of an unknown digit in the Kropki, twice, before deducing the digit set.

Wonderful puzzles across the board though, thanks for creating them!

Same sentiment from me. Very interesting puzzles to solve! Some took me a reallllly long time to solve though...

Thanks Jeffrey and SS!