Samurai Sudoku (PuzzleMadness)

About Samurai Sudoku (PuzzleMadness)

A Samurai Sudoku is five ordinary 9x9 sudokus joined into one: a grid in the middle, with four more grids each sharing one corner box with it. Every grid follows the normal rules, and the four shared boxes have to satisfy two grids at once. It is a long puzzle, closer to five sudokus than one.

The daily page opens today's puzzle on its own, and its title carries the date (on 3 October 2026 it read "Daily Medium Samurai Sudoku Puzzle for Saturday 3rd October 2026 (Medium)"). There is a separate dated puzzle for each difficulty: Easy, Medium, Hard, Tough and Mixed. Past days stay in the archive, so a missed puzzle can be played later, and there is a print version and an image download of the grid. PuzzleMadness does not publish solutions: the site tells you when you have finished a grid correctly or made a mistake. Each completed puzzle adds to your total on the Samurai Sudoku monthly and all-time leaderboards, where only your best score on any one puzzle counts.

PuzzleMadness suggests working each of the five grids on its own at first, and only using the shared corners once you get stuck or near the end. The corner boxes are where a stalled grid usually gets unstuck, because a digit placed there counts in two grids. Set aside more time than for a single sudoku.

PuzzleMadness is a British puzzle site with dozens of daily puzzle types in the browser, from many sudoku variants to logic grids such as Nurikabe, Hashi and Slitherlink. It is free to play and carries ads. A free account keeps track of the puzzles you have finished and puts your name on the leaderboards, and the badges next to usernames mark how many puzzles a player has completed.

How to play Samurai Sudoku (PuzzleMadness)

1. Open the day's Samurai Sudoku page and choose Easy, Medium, Hard, Tough or Mixed.
2. Treat each of the five 9x9 grids as a normal sudoku: rows, columns and 3x3 boxes hold 1 to 9 once.
3. Use the four shared corner boxes, which belong to two grids, to carry digits from one grid into another.
4. Finish all five grids; the site tells you when the whole puzzle is correct.

Screenshots

Tips

• Solve the easiest-looking outer grid first, then push its shared corner into the middle grid.
• A shared box must fit both grids, so check both sets of rows and columns before writing a digit there.
• Use Cloud Save if you want to finish over more than one sitting.

Questions