How to Select Sudoku Solutions

It's easy to miss the answers to last week's sudoku challenge in the newspaper, especially when you get distracted by the demands of everyday life. Staring at that completed or almost-finished puzzle can be aggravating, especially when you're not sure whether you solved it correctly. Thankfully, there are several websites that offer sudoku solutions from major newspapers and magazines online.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Sudoku solutions database

1. Visit a website that collects master lists of solutions, such as Sudoku.com (see Resources below), the manufacturers of both virtual and board game versions of sudoku.
2. Select a publication from the list of hundreds of newspapers all over the world. A variety of publications are featured online, from puzzles found in a small London newspaper to the ones featured in the major papers in New York. Solutions for a select number of magazines may also be found.
3. Input the first five numbers of the puzzle you're currently working on. These numbers are found in the puzzle itself. They are the first five printed numbers of the puzzle, read from left to right and then from top to bottom.
4. Click the "find solutions" button. You solution will either be shown on a different page or come up as a separate window.
5. Know that solutions to collections of sudoku puzzles found in books will not be featured online. The answers to these puzzles are most commonly found in the back of the book. To access the solution for the puzzle, look up the puzzle number in the answers section.

Tips & Warnings

• If you're not yet finished with the sudoku puzzle and want a little help rather than the entire solution, consider searching for a hints section instead. One or two hints may be just the thing to get you back on track and enable you to solve the puzzle on your own.
• If you're having trouble pulling up a sudoku solution online, check to make sure the browser is allowing pop-ups from the website you're visiting.
• Not all publications will be featured online. If you can't find the publication you're looking for, there's a good chance that newspaper or magazine doesn't use puzzles supplied by the website you're visiting.
• Be aware of sites offering more than one solution for a sudoku puzzle. Sudoku puzzles that are properly created will not have more than one solution.