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Boggle Sudoku

Boggle Sudoku

Safe shaking occurs when you envelop the board in loosely wrapped Plastic Wrap. Naturally, the idea is to have the displayed letters (in any orientation) occur in each row, column and block of 9 cells. The cartoon shows a failed attempt. As an added bonus, once you’ve come upon the solution, you can look for small words in the language of your choice occuring contiguously left (backward), or right (forward) or up or down or diagonally.

The game Boggle (TM) was invented by Allan Turoff and usually comes in a 4 x 4 grid. Larger Boggle games use a 5 x 5 grid. There is also a children’s version of Boggle as well as a travel version. See Wikipedia for details.

I’ve gotten some feedback during last week and I am happy to report that the Website for color sudoku puzzles, mentioned last February, 2007, which was called Brainfreeze Puzzles is no longer “frozen”. The site has been revamped; Philip Riley and Laura Taalman’s Color Sudoku book was published in mid-2007.

Look for the Published Puzzles link for free puzzle variations. There are also tutorials for the Sudoku variants. An original innovation is the Bold X variant, with 6 diagonals, 2 main diagonals and 4 “subprime” neighboring diagonals, which have non-repeating digits as well (just not all the numbers).

I’m glad the site is active again. It is a treasure trove of color and variants.

Another viewer simply named Maff, from the United Kingdom, observed that all of the variants that have been shown in this Blog are by and large based on a 9 x 9 Sudoku Grid. This of course is not an accident, since the subtext of the blog is to demonstrate the vast utility of Power (squared) Sudoku White Boards and clipboards, even if (or when) you tire of the original Sudoku puzzle and seek to recapture that old excitement via variations.

Maff has a site called Sudoku Evolution which has created and displays Sudoku variants where the board size is a variable. The site offers a monthly magazine, eBooks, including a free sample pdf file, in which you can modify the file to save or reset your solution entries, as well as print the original puzzle.

The rules for each variant are depicted as graphical animations in an easy and clear manner. Despite there being a few broken links in some of the larger sized 2-D and 3-D puzzles, I plan to spend some time on these kinds of variants. Thanks for letting me know about this site, Maff!