I was screwing around with trying to mash up puzzle types and reinvented what I'm calling Sudoku Word Search. It's a letter-sudoku puzzle with words hidden in the puzzle, and you have to deduce where the words are in order to solve them.

As in, the puzzle does not have a unique solution using sudoku logic alone. You must use one of two forms of hidden word logic to finish the puzzle. 1) Deduce where a word must be placed and add letters, or 2) deduce where a word may not be placed and restrict letters. To keep it more sudoku like and aid in solving, every row, column, and box has at least one letter of a found word.

In playtesting I thought it was fun, although at times very difficult for me (I'm not an expert sudoku player), so I thought I'd build it out to share.

The puzzles are generated by creating racks of 9 unique letters, finding all words that can be made with those letters, generating sample grids, finding the words in them, throwing out candidates that don't fit the word placement criteria, then carving the board by removing letters until two constraints hold: we have >=2 solutions by sudoku logic and exactly 1 solution when the word search logic is added. Overall about 60000 puzzles are generated and thrown out for every sound one.

I used Claude pretty extensively for the code, which includes:

- Puzzle generator - Puzzle solver - Puzzle explainer - Static website (Cloudflare) - Online puzzle player (local storage) - Online static puzzle walkthrough - Print book layouts - PDF layouts

Overall, it's been a lot of fun to focus on for a few weeks.

https://www.sudokuwordsearch.com