My previous Heyawake Sudoku with Chaos Construction was very hard, so I decided to create an approachable version (estimated difficulty 2.5*) with given regions! :-)
I hope you will enjoy and I would be really grateful for all the comments and ratings.
Normal sudoku rules apply.
Kropki dots: Digits in cells joined by a white dot are consecutive. Digits in cells joined by a black dot are in a 1:2 ratio (i.e., one digit will be double the other). Not all dots are necessarily given.
Heyawake: Shade some cells so that no two shaded cells are orthogonally adjacent and the remaining unshaded cells form one orthogonally connected area. There cannot be a horizontal or vertical line of unshaded cells that goes through 2 or more region borders.
Circles: Digits in circles cannot repeat and must indicate at least one (but may indicate both) of the following:
- the number of shaded cells in their region
- the number of unshaded cells in all (up to 9) surrounding cells
Shaded cells: Only digits 1, 2, 3 and 4 can appear in shaded cells.
Heyawake Explanation:
You can see on the example above how heyawake works. You can also try to play an example here or a big 9x9 heyawake here before you solve the sudoku. Rules are also explained here.
If you would like to try more challenging Sudoku/Heyawake hybrid, here they are:
- Heyawake Chaos by mellowrobinson
- Heyawake Sudoku by me
Lösungscode: All digits in shaded cells in normal reading order (left-to-right and top-to-bottom).
am 3. Februar 2026, 14:07 Uhr von MattYDdraig
The puzzle was fun and very approachable (once re-reading that the circles were a set of unique digits) ~~but the heyawake shading was non-unique. Naturally, the solution code was the last one I tried.~~
SK: Thanks for solving! I am 100% positive Heyawake is unique, did you see the rule regarding runs of unshaded cells and digits in circles indicating number of shaded/unshaded?
MyD: My apologies. I did see the rule but somehow inverted it in my head at the ending so I could shade/unshaded r1c9 either way, which obviously is wrong on my part since it counts the wrong thing.
am 28. Januar 2026, 21:04 Uhr von dzamie
Pretty interesting, although the standard sudoku layout did kind of make the heyawake a little boring.
I think also that the heavy imbalance of how many circles were used for one indicator versus another made it a little difficult to keep both of them in mind, but that's also probably just because this is a new ruleset and so I'm not used to it.
I think a version of this that's irregular sudoku would be cool (I know you already did the CC one, but as you say, providing the regions makes the puzzle much more approachable).