The Thermo Sudoku With A Chain Reaction

Such an easy break in. O managed to see it and think sets and yet just not use it and waste over an hour. Redid the puzzle usong obvious break inand its so fast tonl solve. Really annoyed with myself.

A very satisfying puzzle! After realizing that the four odd cells make up a duplicate pair, one pair forming two sets of 1-9 together with the corner digits, and one pair with the ring, the puzzle flows really well. Nice one!

The 15 minute puzzle that takes 45 minutes! Once you see it, it falls apart like a card castle. Very pretty.

yaaassssssss qween

I finished in 125:53 minutes. This puzzle had such fun geometry in it that took me a while to appreciate. I quickly spotted the limitation of the cell that fits in the empty space of the cages being limited to just two spots in the cage. That immediately helped me rule down possibilities on the thermometer that spanned from box four to box two. Then, the most amazing part happened. I was actually able to spot some SET Theory and linked all those cells in the crux of the cages to each other. I felt really good about that as I am terrible with SET Theory. The next part took me a while to see, but I was able to prove that 6 wasn't capable of being in r2c5. I did it through a roundabout way and it ended up breaking by having too many 8's in column eight. I did that in a hard way, but way later, I found a crucial step that proved that and even more. I thought about the cell r1c3 and the fact that it was forced onto the dot in box three if it wasn't he same as r2c5. Surprisingly, this forced it to be a 4, so that cell was only capable of being a 4 or 7. Because of that, placing a 4 into r4c3 through any means, it forces a 34 on the thermo in box four and cause the kropki dot to be a 12 pair. This would cause the thermo on the bottom right to have a minimum of 6 on it's tail, which means that r8c5 couldn't pair to it as 6 is eliminated due to SET Theory totals. This means that r8c5 has to be a 5 and that r5c8 must be a 9 to appease SET Theory. This now breaks as there are now two 9's in row 3, in r3c1 and r3c9. That was amazing to figure out and so hard for me to see. The next part was not as hard, but I didn't apply it universally the first time I saw it. I noticed that the cells like r8c2 were limited in where they could go in cages, especially if numbers were already placed and there were already pencil marked ruling out some cells. I ruled a 5 out of r8c2 for that reason as it had nowhere to go in the left cage. However, it took me an embarrassingly long time to see that 5 was also ruled out from r2c2 for the same reason. Seeing that finally eliminated 4 from being in r1c3 and practically decided the rest of the puzzle. That trick right there was such a cool display of geometry and excellent setting. Despite what my time says, I enjoyed every second of this puzzle. This has to be one of my favorites. Great Puzzle!

93 minutes

Goes to show how bifurcating is a much less fun way to solve stuff.

it looked too much like a phistomefel to not go for the set theory right from start.

I immediately had a feeling it was set, but as usual wasn't sure where to apply it. Flowed nicely afterwards.

52:23 for me, i'm surprised I even managed to beat this one entirely on my own! after the break-in it was pretty straightforward though

idk if the break-in was the same but i did it by combining phistomefel's ring with the cages to realize that the phistomefel corners were equal to the rest of the corner boxes minus the middle cells from boxes 2, 4, 6, 8. meaning that 4 sets of 1-9 were equal to twice the phistomefel corners plus the four middle cells, it's pretty clear then that the 4 middle cells must be 2 distinct numbers twice

This is why Sudoku solving resembles Chess. It is all about pattern recognition. This puzzle was an easy 15 min solve once you saw that the set theory provided the to digits. Like the best Chess players, if you see and remember the patterns, it is much more straightforward. Great puzzle!

11:57 for me. I'm usually not that good at sets compared to Simon so I have to watch why did it take so long for him this time

I wish you could mark in the comments at what time the solving starts. You tend to use 10-15 minutes talking about things I have no interest in…I have to skip forward, and if I skip too far
you are already deep into the solving.

Thanks for not having another 'hype' title on the video.

First time I've ever found useful SET logic on my own!

Wonderful puzzle

This is one of those puzzles where I was lucky enough to immediately spot the break in but only because my brain went "this puzzle appears to be built for this technique". I don't think I'd have been able to figure it out if I wasn't already primed to look for it.