Logic Masters Deutschland e.V.

This puzzle was set for the second round of Agent's Puzzle Agency Championship. The prompt for this round was to create a puzzle that involved cloning a 3x3 portion of the grid.

Normal 9x9 sudoku rules apply.
Cave: Shade some cells so that the shaded cells are all connected orthogonally by other shaded cells to the edge of the grid, and the remaining unshaded cells form one orthogonally connected area.

Japanese Sums: Clues outside the grid indicate the sums of connected groups of numbers in unshaded cells in the respective row or column, in order, where shaded cells serve as delimiters between groups. A question mark indicates any digit from 0 to 9, but no clue may have a leading zero. "..." denotes an arbitrary number of Japanese sum clues. This could be zero, one, or multiple.

Cipher: Clues outside the grid have been ciphered and each letter represents a different number from 1 to 9.

Clone: The red outlined 3x3 regions contain the same digits AND cave colourings in the same arrangement without rotation or reflection.



Sudokupad: https://sudokupad.app/22b2vnkuze