Over the Board
(Published on 28. February 2026, 13:00 by juggler)
Fill the grid with digits from 1-9 so that no digit repeats in a row, column, or box.
CHESS SUMS - A digit on a chess piece is the sum of all cells that chess piece could move to in a single move.
- All pieces can cross box borders, but only knights can jump across gaps in the grid.
- Pawns can move once space upwards or diagonally upwards.
Solution code: The middle column
Comments
on 3. March 2026, 09:25 by Guvenistan
Should be called "(All) Over the Board". Ridiculously hard but ridiculously fun.
on 1. March 2026, 15:47 by eladv
Whow, this was one of the hardest sudokus I've ever solved.
It's not actually that hard once you know what you're looking at. But I had more than an hour of false starts just trying to figure out what to do, before I realized how to think of it. And then my solve really started.
(slight spoiler alert.... if you want to come to the puzzle totally blank, don't read the below...)
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I think the difficulty kind of comes from a "misdirect". This puzzle looks like one of juggler's chess-piece puzzles (which are kind of a variant of an arrow puzzle). And so I kept treating it as such, thus the hour of false starts. But in fact the chess constraints are not the key here -- the grid shape is. This puzzle is much closer to juggler's Kurtosis or Mezzanines, than to Summer Knights or Cloister. Once I realized that, and properly appreciated the implications of the grid shape, the puzzle came together, and was really a 3.5*. But before that, it was purely impossible.
I guess the title is really appropriate on a meta level -- the puzzle really forces you to think "all over the board", and appreciate what you're really looking at. It's truly beautiful, though I think that people that are not juggler connoisseurs like me wouldn't know what to do here, and might miss how beautiful this puzzle is, and how elegantly it plays with the conventions of the genre.
on 28. February 2026, 22:21 by Exigus
Excellent construction. Thanks!
on 28. February 2026, 18:38 by juggler
(Fixed solution code)
