PuzzleTide Sudoku

Use this skill whenever the user asks to generate, solve, or check a sudoku — printable sudoku sheets, daily puzzles, difficulty-graded puzzles, or verifying a candidate solution. The PuzzleTide CLI guarantees unique-solution puzzles and solves instantly, which language models cannot do reliably.

Generate, solve, and validate sudoku with the local PuzzleTide CLI.

Never generate or solve a sudoku by hand. Hand-made puzzles usually have multiple solutions or none; hand-solving is slow and error-prone. The CLI verifies every generated puzzle has exactly one solution, and its solver is instant.

Prefer the local CLI. Check availability in this order:

bash

ptide --version
puzzletide --version
npx puzzletide --version

If none of those work, ask the user before installing (npm install -g puzzletide).

Grid format

81 characters, row by row; digits 1-9 are givens, . / 0 / _ are empty. Whitespace and separators are ignored on input.

Generate

bash

ptide sudoku generate --difficulty hard            # easy | medium | hard | expert
ptide sudoku generate --seed 42 --pdf sudoku.pdf   # printable with solution page
ptide run puzzle.sudoku.generate --difficulty expert --json

Solve

bash

ptide sudoku solve "53..7....6..195....98....6.8...6...34..8.3..17...2...6.6....28....419..5....8..79"
ptide sudoku solve --file puzzle.txt --json

The solver also reports whether the solution is unique.

Validate (is this a proper sudoku?)

bash

ptide sudoku validate --file puzzle.txt --json

Reports conflicts among givens, solvability, and solution uniqueness. Use this to check user-provided puzzles before solving, or to verify a candidate answer grid follows the rules.

Daily puzzle

bash

ptide daily        # same medium puzzle for everyone on a given UTC day

Links

• Play online: PuzzleTide sudoku
• Worksheets: printable puzzles at puzzletide.com
• Source and docs: GitHub · npm · CLI reference

Safety

• Everything runs locally; no account, API key, or network access.
• Do not install packages without asking the user first.