Sudoku Made and maintained by Brian Hamilton and Karan Hamilton.
Brian builds the playable puzzle tools, while Karan helps test clarity, difficulty feel, and the player experience.
Playable puzzles and controls are tested in the browser for rule accuracy, usability, and a clear solving experience. See how we make and test puzzles, our editorial standards, or report a problem.
Christmas Sudoku: Nine Festive Tiles, One Classic Rule
Christmas Sudoku is our December version of classic Sudoku: the same rows, columns, and boxes, but the digits are swapped for nine festive tiles — tree, gift, Santa, candy cane, reindeer, snowflake, bell, star, and cookie. You can flip back to plain numbers at any point; the puzzle underneath doesn't change.
Why we made a Christmas board
We built this site as grandparents who wanted our grandkids to grow up with the puzzles we did, and December is the one month the whole family is reliably around the same table. A Sudoku board covered in gifts and reindeer gets a young child to sit down next to a grandparent in a way a grid of digits never has. That was the entire design brief for this page: a proper Sudoku that a mixed-age family can actually share during the holidays.
The nine tiles, and why these nine
Picking tiles for a picture Sudoku is harder than it looks: you need nine symbols that stay distinct when they are rendered smaller than a fingernail on a phone. Santa, the tree, and the gift carry strong, different silhouettes at any size. The pair to watch is the snowflake and the star — both pale, both spiky — and the gift and the cookie can blur when you are scanning quickly. If you catch yourself double-checking those, that is what the Both display mode is for: it keeps the pictures but adds a small number badge to every tile, so the snowflake is always a 6 no matter how small your screen is.
One quirk worth knowing: the smaller boards use the first tiles in the set. A 4x4 game is played entirely with the tree, gift, Santa, and candy cane. The reindeer and snowflake only arrive at 6x6, and the bell, star, and cookie are reserved for the full 9x9.
If your youngest player is asking why there is no reindeer on the small board — it is waiting on 6x6. The bell, star, and cookie only appear on the full 9x9 grid.
An advent solving tradition
The nicest way we know to use this page: treat it like an advent calendar. One puzzle a day from December 1st, scaling up as the month goes — 4x4 Easy in the first week with the youngest solvers, 6x6 through the middle of the month, then 9x9 as Christmas gets close.
Save a 9x9 Expert for Christmas Eve and make it the family boss fight: one person scans rows, another takes the boxes, and the youngest calls out which pictures are still missing. The timer will remember exactly how long the family argument lasted.
The logic never takes a holiday
Every board here is a proper Sudoku with a single solution: each tile exactly once per row, column, and box — no repeats, no exceptions, even for Santa. Difficulty levels, notes, hints, and the picture-or-number display modes work the same way on every themed board we make, so we explain them once on the Themed Sudoku page rather than repeating them here. That page is also where you will find the rest of the collection for when the decorations come down in January.
Christmas Sudoku FAQ
The smaller boards take the first tiles in the set. A 4x4 puzzle uses the tree, gift, Santa, and candy cane; the reindeer and snowflake join at 6x6; and the bell, star, and cookie only appear on the full 9x9 board.
Yes. The display selector switches between pictures, numbers, or both. The Both mode adds a small number badge to each picture tile, which helps when the snowflake and star start to look alike on a small screen.
Yes. Every puzzle has exactly one solution and follows the classic rule: each tile appears once in every row, column, and box. The theme changes the look, not the logic.