Sudoku Square

Anne is a big fan of sudoku puzzles.  She doesn't go through whole books of them like she did when we first met.  But we play a game once in a while.  I found this Sudoku Square game in Sedona, only to find out it really has nothing to do with sudoku at all, except for the name.

Well, it looked like a cute puzzle anyway.  The idea is that each player gets a board and a set of pieces.  There are a bunch of dice with weird symbols.  Roll those dice and there's a setup phase that feels like Bingo: read off the letter and symbol on each die and put a stopper at that location.

That's all the setup.  Now, just try to fit all those wooden pieces onto the board with the stoppers blocking those squares.  The rule book claims that there will ALWAYS be a solution, but I don't see how they guarantee that at all.

Still, it took me about four minute to solve the first one, and Anne got hers, too.  For some reason, the second puzzle only took me about thirty seconds.  I just saw which pieces needed to go where.  We both got a bit stuck on the third one, and Anne got hers done first, after which I saw a fix for my uncompleted puzzle.

There was a second puzzle that was undocumented and unexpected: putting the pieces into the little plastic bags provided.  Anne tried to square up all the pieces, but it was clear at a glance that the baggies were not big enough to get all the pieces inside in one layer ... just look at the thickness of the blocks.  

Or, compare the filled bag to the amount of space on the board, which the is the size of all the pieces filling a single layer.  I think I proved that the pieces will not fit back into those little bags in a single layer.  A few have to go on a second layer.  But I remain skeptical that the creators can prove that every combination of stoppers gives a solvable puzzle.

This was a fun puzzle, but I was hoping for a game.