Suduro

It is April Fools Day in many countries, today, an informal celebration of fun silliness, celebrated largely by playing gentle pranks on our friends. In honor of April Fools Day, today’s puzzle is mixed up, as follows: The sums clues (the numbers showing the sums of gray squares, that is) are actually taken from two *different* puzzles! The two puzzles are *almost* the same puzzle, except that the original puzzle (the one that you should solve) and the second puzzle differ in that in each puzzle’s answer, the numbers are scrambled, trading 1s for 9s, 2s for 8s, 3s for 7s, and 4s for 6s (while 5s stay unchanged). For example, if a particular row or column of the answer in the original puzzle read “1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9″, the answer for the same row or column of the second puzzle would read “9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1″. (Mathematically speaking, if a particular cell in one of the two puzzles reads “n”, the same cell in the other completed puzzle reads “10-n”.) Now, here is how I scrambled the clues for April Fools Day: The clues “18,19,17,3,4,16,8,11,15″ in the top black row all come from the original puzzle, the one that you should solve. The clues in the vertical left black strip (”4,18,15,24,7,13,5,9,24) all come from the *second* puzzle. The clues in the white 3-by-3 box in the upper left are *really* mixed up, coming at random from both puzzles! With a bit of careful logic, you can rebuild the original puzzle (which is actually a fairly easy Suduro, as Suduros go) from the information given. If you would just prefer a straight suduro, follow the link to the

print version here to see the original puzzle with unscrambled sums clues. All of the answer pages, below, also, are set up in the normal way, with the original sums clues. For a short discussion of the logic involved in unscrambling the clues, go to the link,

here. Puzzle 2853

By Dan Tow, Copyright 2012, All Rights Reserved