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Comment by ghostbrainalpha | Hacker News Reader

Sudoku is that for me. Feels exactly like work, but perfectly balanced where is hard enough to be interesting and easy enough to be fun.

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Sudoku is so one of those fiddly and error prone tasks much better performed by computer for me.

I wrote a computer solver for Sudoku and that was enough for me, I feel no need to ever play again ;-)

That's really cool! And if you are trying just to beat the puzzle it would make sense to automate the task.

I play ALOT of Sudoku and the game now for me is optimizing my own thoughts while I play. Moving from a random search and find function, to a structure queries that solve the puzzles quicker and quicker. Sort of like a rubix cube. I focus on beating my best time and making it easier and easier.

I used to feel this way too, but I found sudoku varients a lot more enjoyable. If you look up the YouTube channel "Cracking the Cryptic" they have a lot of different ones.

Yes - after I got bored of regular Sudoku, I found "Killer Sudoku" and I've been playing that variant regularly for a long time. The hard puzzles (blank with no "easy" parts) in the killer variant are quite challenging, and over a span of years I've continued to gain new insights into better techniques for finding the answers. The logical chains you have to build up just to eliminate one possible number somewhere really stretch the brain! More often they're merely tough and I can solve them in one sitting in under half an hour. It's a great mental warmup in the morning with coffee, to get the brain juices going!

You might enjoy KenKen puzzles as well. They are similar to Sodoku but involve more math. I find them to be very fun, although the harder ones can start to feel like work.

I kinda have the same feeling when speedrunning Unlimited Wordle [0].

[0]: https://tck.mn/speedle

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