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.
St Patrick's Day Sudoku: No Luck Required
St Patrick's Day Sudoku covers the grid in lucky charms — shamrock, four-leaf clover, rainbow, gold coin, pot of gold, top hat, Irish music, Irish flag, and green heart — and then, delightfully, makes luck useless. Each tile goes exactly once in every row, column, and box, and every single placement can be proven.
The anti-luck game
Finding a four-leaf clover in a field is a matter of chance. Finding where the four-leaf clover belongs in this grid never is: the row, the column, and the box between them leave exactly one legal cell, and a careful solver can point to the evidence. That is the joke at the heart of this board, and it is a useful one to say out loud to a young solver — on St Patrick's Day of all days, the puzzle rewards reasoning and pays no attention whatsoever to fortune.
Count the leaves
The set opens with its own initiation test: the shamrock and the four-leaf clover share the beginner 4x4 board, and the only difference between them is one leaf — three against four. Every player mixes them up once; most never do again. Anyone who keeps miscounting can ask the display options to print a digit on each tile and let arithmetic do the botany.
Where the gold is
A single gold coin sits on the 4x4 board, but the whole pot — along with the top hat — waits at 6x6, and the Irish music, flag, and green heart only join the full 9x9. So the board pays out the way the legend says: you follow the rainbow through the bigger grids to reach the gold. The rainbow tile itself moonlights, too — it has an entire board of its own over at Rainbow Sudoku, where the colours are the puzzle.
Every puzzle we publish is checked to have exactly one solution, so a provable next move always exists — the only question is whether you can find it. Fortune is not consulted at any point.
One rule, every leaf
A finished grid has each charm exactly once per row, column, and box, and there is precisely one way to get there. For how grading, hints, and notes work — and for the rest of the collection — the Themed Sudoku page is the place.
St Patrick's Day Sudoku FAQ
Count the leaves: three for the shamrock, four for the clover. They share the beginner 4x4 board deliberately — it is the theme's built-in test — and the display options can add a digit label to every tile if the counting gets old.
None at all, which is the joke of the theme. Every puzzle is checked to have exactly one solution, so a provable next move always exists at every step — harder difficulties just make it harder to spot.
The 4x4 uses the shamrock, four-leaf clover, rainbow, and gold coin; the pot of gold and top hat arrive at 6x6; and the Irish music, Irish flag, and green heart complete the full 9x9.