One Of The Very Best Fog Sudokus 

Loved that the fog being revealed barely helped the solver and it was almost entirely logic of the rest of the rules.

41:20 "if forced to i can do sudoku" he says, ignoring the placable 9 in box 7

I have to admit that it was only until a few videos ago that I realized Maverick was an airplane, not a bird or house cat.

Simon: "I'm almost tempted to colour it..." Me "What a relief, thankyou!!"

I can't imagine not enjoying a FoW puzzle, or down rating it as Simon said. Absolutely one of my favorite types of sudoku. If anything, the fog helps follow the logic.

Thank you so much for the shoutout Simon! I'm so glad you enjoyed my nail art!

This has to be one of the most wholesome RU-vid channels ever. Love it.

I actually paused and figured it out when he said to and I felt so proud!

@53:30, you haven't ruled out the possibility that the snake goes around r5c9 by using 5 cells in box 6, and then also takes r2c9 & r3c9. It turned out to be a lucky error, and it meant you skipped one extra bit of elegant setting. It took me a little while staring at that before realising that the important bit was that every possible configuration meant 5 digits in box 6, and therefore the 16 cage must be 1249. Now the 1249 quad in r1 means that r1c9 has one of the 5 digits in the largest cage, so the rest of c9 can only have 4 of those digits. And that is what prevents the snake taking r3c9, and forces it to take r4c7. An amazingly good FoW puzzle.

Simon at 41:22: "if forced to, I can do sudoku", removing a 9 pencilmark in r9c2... Also Simon: forgets to place the 9 straightaway in r8c2 for the next 26 minutes 😀

I got 111 minutes. Realizing the break-in after being lost for 30 minutes was very satisfying and the rest of the puzzle felt very nice. Fog of Wars are always my favorite and this one was fantastic!

the 9 in box 7 was literally my second digit of the solve, but I loved seeing Simon solve the puzzle in a very different but entertaining way! Also I somehow misread the 46 cage as a 45 cage and panicked the same way

I never thought these two worlds of mine would collide, but I am so excited for it! Roller Derby is a full contact sport played on quad roller skates. It is played on either a flat track or curved track with a complex set of rules, but the best analogy I have found that works is to describe it as a Rugby Scrum on wheels. I highly recommend looking a few matches up on RU-vid to gain a full appreciation for the sport. Greetings from another CTC Roller Derby player.

That was hard! But very rewarding. The way the cage size constraint and the adjacent cages can't share digits constraint interacted produced very original logic.

Thank you so much for the birthday wishes!

I had an epiphany about triangular numbers watching this video. 15 is the triangular number for 5, 5x3, but for 9 it's 45, 9x5. Following the pattern, 7's is 7x4, which is correct. The thing that just clicked as I paused the video and mulled it over is that there are 3 lots of 5 you can make with 1,2,3,4, and 5, {1,4}, {2,3}, and {5}, summing to 15. There are 4 ways to make 7, and 5 ways to make 9. 🤯 I think this will greatly help me with a lot of variant sudokus

1:31:23 - What a beautiful construction. Well done @AstralSky - I loved it.

Hey Simon! I was just wondering if you'd find it interesting to have an eye tracker on during your solves. I thought that it could be annoying for you to see the actual grid, but maybe it can be toggled just on the video. I'm not sure if that's a great idea but it could be nice!

Puzzle idea: A ship going through the grid with the fog revealing ‘uncharted territory’ by making the blue sea lighter colour , sea monsters appear, etc.

I like to follow along with Simon, and I’m proud to say that this is the first puzzle where I’ve solved it before the end of the video!

Dear Simon, at 52:15 you made the deduction that the snake couldn't go through R2C9 too quickly. The orange region could have gone up in C9 via R6C9, R6C8, R5C8, R4C8, R4C4, R3C9, R2C9, R2C8 with there being only 5 digits in column 9 and cage 6.

that 16 cage in box 2 is really magical

I *really* loved the break-in on this puzzle!

At 50:58 Simon concludes that the orange cage can only have 5 different numbers and can thus not pass the non fogged cell (R3C8) because there would be to many orange cells in column 9. Which is true if you go straight but if you make a C shape in box 6 like he did at 50:24 and you go left in row 2 of box 3 it would work wouldn't it? You'll only have 5 orange cell in box 6 and 5 orange cells in column 9. The box would have a total of 10 or 12 cells but that was nog against the rules. I get why it couldn't be like that later on when the numers where clear but at that time in the solve I believe it would kept the option open. I'm I missing something?

I've been waiting for a new fow puzzle over the last week or so, nice!

If you do crtl A and then go to the drawing tool you can press delete and it will delete all drawn items in one go.

Roller derby is to roller skating as motocross is to bicycling

love love loved this puzzle. I love puzzles like this that are very hard but very very very fair. This was lovely!

This puzzle took me over two hours to solve by I enjoyed it a lot. I was making really great early progress but hit an absolute wall. I just scrubbed through your video because I wanted to timestamp where I was stuck so any future reader could see and it looks like I solved this *wildly* differently than you did. That’s pretty unusual for a fog puzzle!

Oh wow, what an amazing puzzle! Thoroughly enjoyed solving this - 77 mins well spent!!

39:55 Thank you for eliminating those Xs! (I think this has come up in the past, my 2c seems like almost anything is better than the big X's.)

I was a little tripped up by the puzzle name at first. I thought the "22" was part of the name. And early on, once we determined the cages shown, it was possible to make a 22 cell snake to connect them all in the middle, and I thought maybe that's where it was going. That was quickly proven wrong by logic, and I didn't realize until after the solve that it is just the setter's 22nd FoW puzzle in this series!

Very well engineered, thanks, and it worked out nicely once I'd remembered all the rules. Even while making progress kept wondering how it would resolve itself but of course it did.

Lovely puzzle. The way the path revealed itself was quite beautiful. The logic was not too difficult either, the tricky thing was remembering the sizes of the cages used!

This is so far above my ability and my speed... but its fascinating to listen to and to watch :)

I really enjoyed this one! Was a great solve.

Love FoW puzzles and this one was definitely one of the best (and hardest ones) I’ve ever solved. Not the worst time either (for me), just over 1.5h for a puzzle that took Simon well over an hour too

wow! Thanks for the blue coverin at the end! You are perfect!

I used Simon a couple of times to help me, but both I had already done as far as I watched to, which gave me the confidence to go back and carry on. A great puzzle, and for me doable.

After about 15 minutes, I went back to read the rules. Glad I did, because I totally forgot about the 4th sentence in them!

This was very fun to watch, Simon. You love the snake puzzles, and it definitely shows! Thank you for the video!

Rules: 06:50 Let's Get Cracking: 09:39 What about this video's Top Tier Simarkisms?! Bobbins: 2x (35:47, 1:10:48) Maverick: 2x (28:10, 1:14:55) The Secret: 2x (07:08, 1:12:17) Knowledge Bomb: 1x (10:47) Three In the Corner: 1x (1:17:48) You Rotten Thing: 1x (1:05:40) And how about this video's Simarkisms?! Snake: 114x (00:33, 08:36, 08:36, 08:47, 08:53, 09:01, 09:08, 09:20, 09:55, 10:30, 10:38, 10:42, 10:44, 10:46, 10:51, 12:44, 12:52, 12:52, 13:10, 13:10, 13:47, 13:49, 13:49, 13:56, 13:56, 14:01, 14:04, 14:06, 14:15, 14:21, 14:29, 14:29, 14:33, 14:36, 14:51, 15:39, 15:56, 16:01, 16:04, 16:09, 16:17, 16:17, 16:21, 16:49, 17:32, 17:44, 19:13, 19:15, 19:51, 19:53, 19:56, 20:15, 20:22, 20:42, 20:57, 21:01, 21:11, 23:34, 23:36, 23:40, 23:48, 24:52, 24:58, 25:12, 27:15, 27:59, 28:22, 31:07, 31:28, 31:28, 31:34, 31:34, 32:40, 34:55, 34:58, 35:07, 35:43, 37:06, 37:09, 37:12, 37:13, 37:13, 40:25, 40:42, 40:45, 42:09, 42:09, 42:13, 42:13, 42:25, 42:25, 42:47, 43:04, 43:06, 43:08, 43:15, 43:24, 45:11, 45:14, 45:31, 49:39, 50:34, 53:20, 53:25, 59:23, 59:29, 1:00:13, 1:00:16, 1:00:18, 1:03:26, 1:04:51, 1:06:03, 1:06:13, 1:18:03) By Sudoku: 13x (03:36, 34:15, 35:51, 36:34, 37:06, 44:36, 56:16, 57:05, 57:08, 1:00:04, 1:00:56, 1:05:35) Ah: 12x (11:25, 15:13, 15:13, 29:45, 36:32, 42:02, 44:13, 44:13, 51:07, 51:07, 1:01:42, 1:12:05) Touch Itself: 10x (08:39, 08:41, 08:56, 09:08, 31:46, 32:42, 42:15, 43:24, 43:37) Hang On: 9x (11:09, 18:23, 22:16, 22:16, 41:56, 41:56, 41:56, 45:19, 1:14:46) Sorry: 5x (16:47, 20:42, 35:07, 59:39, 1:01:58) Brilliant: 5x (1:09:59, 1:10:02, 1:18:16, 1:18:37, 1:18:37) Goodness: 4x (11:07, 29:48, 43:28, 1:12:10) Stuck: 4x (02:31, 02:48, 25:28, 1:12:05) Beautiful: 4x (38:38, 51:10, 1:16:03, 1:18:28) Gorgeous: 4x (29:45, 29:48, 50:36, 1:15:49) What Does This Mean?: 4x (21:31, 41:09, 1:06:20, 1:14:28) What on Earth: 3x (03:46, 36:06, 1:01:42) Clever: 3x (15:01, 15:13, 54:13) Shouting: 3x (03:19, 04:25, 06:27) Obviously: 3x (56:39, 1:05:55, 1:07:21) Pencil Mark/mark: 3x (1:01:58, 1:11:02, 1:15:40) Cake!: 3x (05:04, 06:14, 06:40) The Answer is: 2x (23:02, 1:15:58) Naughty: 2x (09:15, 42:15) Lovely: 2x (1:07:55, 1:10:38) Of All Things: 2x (41:00, 58:09) In Fact: 2x (11:39, 59:15) Wow: 2x (21:57, 32:11) Good Grief: 1x (19:56) What a Puzzle: 1x (1:17:51) I Have no Clue: 1x (06:01) Ridiculous: 1x (54:07) First Digit: 1x (35:32) Unbelievable: 1x (30:50) Phone is Buzzing: 1x (40:49) Symmetry: 1x (23:14) Triangular Number: 1x (38:06) Weird: 1x (27:33) Most popular number(>9), digit and colour this video: Sixteen (26 mentions) Five (86 mentions) Orange (21 mentions) Antithesis Battles: Low (2) - High (1) Even (4) - Odd (1) Lowest (2) - Highest (0) Black (2) - White (0) Row (13) - Column (11) FAQ: Q1: You missed something! A1: That could very well be the case! Human speech can be hard to understand for computers like me! Point out the ones that I missed and maybe I'll learn! Q2: Can you do this for another channel? A2: I've been thinking about that and wrote some code to make that possible. Let me know which channel you think would be a good fit!

46:19 for me. What an extraordinary fog of war! ❤ The beginning is not so hard but the last big breakthrough in box 2 is just breathtaking, I am glad not to have given up before finding it on my own!

My strategy for the start was to draw both in different colours for visualisation

I've started playing them before watching in the last 5-10 puzzles, and this time I managed to get through with only looking at the video once, and it was only 1 break-in conclusion I'd missed (there's only four numbers of 1,2,3,4 in a row 🤦 at 30:30). Still took me 2 hours to finish 😅. But just wanted to thank you Simon for getting me from a sudoku newb, to consistently attempting and mostly on my own completing these fairly high difficulty sudokus.

I just got to the first digit and LAUGHED. I already love this puzzle and I am only at the first digit.

Very exciting puzzle.

at 47:00 if you count the tiles after the len2 cage, to the end of the 16-cage, you end up with 12 tiles. Thats how you can deduce it must be a Len8 cage connecting to the Len4 sixteen cage

01:29 This one almost did me in. Got there in the end.

53:29 finish. I struggled a bit with the path in the bottom right of the grid, but worked at it from the other direction and was able to push through. A excellent puzzle!

The restriction about cage sizes was too easy for me to forget, but still fun.

Finished in 43:36. The key to the whole puzzle was the snake and the limitations around the cage sizes. Very interesting way of setting the fog of war up. Fun puzzle!

I might be stupid but it took me forever to realize the snake also cannot touch itself parallelly. I guess in order for the snake to touch itself parallelly it has to touch orthogonally first.

Finally wrestled this snake into submission in 134:45. Figuring out how to somehow leverage that 16 cage was quite a challenge. Wonderful puzzle!

At 47:50 For me I realized the cage cannot go 6 tiles upwards, cus that means it would occupy 6 digits, and the 16-cage needs 4 unique digits. This should help down the line as the 16 cage needs a 1 or a 2, so the snake cannot pass through boss in box6

It too me forever to notice that the “46” had appeared when the fog cleared. I’m glad Simon also took a while to notice

59:27 for me - FoW is one of my favorite Sudoku variants, glad I did this one.

Oh terrific! Another short one!!!??!!

This puzzle presented an interesting new challenge. I really enjoyed it! My time was 52:06, solver number 5910.

1:01:58 Did Simon say he is "going a bit too HAM on the pencil marking"? lol

I started with different first numbers and got to finish it in 67 min. I feel really proud :)

Solved it with help from the video.

I tend to not be great at snake and loop puzzles, and an hour video suggests higher difficulty, but I like fog puzzles and this was a pretty good half hour for me. I forgot the size rule, but wasn't stuck on that for long. There was some logic that I'd say took some creative thinking, so maybe I got lucky that I thought of it early. Box 2 was a really nice surprise and I'm glad I didn't wait long to try it when I got stuck. I'd probably put it at a 3/5 rather than a 4/5. Give it a try if you're on the fence about the difficulty.

Hey Simon, I’ve been watching for a long time but I’ve only just today started trying to actually solve the puzzles on my own. Even with how difficult they look when you solve them, I realize you make it look easy in comparison. Would you possibly be able to do a video on Just Arrows by Eric Rathbun? It is a 93% approval, three star difficulty on Logic Masters Germany, and it feels stunning, but I am completely stuck! I fully broke it and have no idea where I went wrong. Either way keep up the great content, thanks!

Am I stupid to think that at 53:06 the snake could wiggle to the left in box 6 and still escape to box 3 through column 9? If that's true, assuming R4C7 is snake is not valid.

57:56 for me - got up to 58:20 in the video in 20 minutes, got stuck for 20 minutes, and after a small hint from simon i saw why r6c8 had to be in the cage, finishing from there.

Given how proper Simon is, I wonder if he knows what the "ham" in "going a bit too ham on the pencilmarks" is an acronym of. 🤔 (I didn't until recently.)

1:19:04 but I'm really happy with that because I solved it without any hints from the video. Fog puzzles are the best, and this was a particularly elegant one.

Thank you for wishing me happy birthday! I'll make sure to send a picture of my cake next year just to spite you! -Luna

Completed in 26m58s.

41:15 "9 is not there by Sudoku, if forced to I can do Sudoku". Immediately ignores the 9 in box 7 that's now forced by Sudoku. I could never, ever replicate Simon's ability to beak into and solve these puzzles, but his brain really does seem to spot absolutely everything except Sudoku. 😂

67:56 with a LOT of help that I really needed. I kept thinking the 52 cage had to be much bigger because I didn't try the math to see that I could get there with four digits. I totally forgot the rule that the cages had to be different sizes. And I wouldn't have figured out how the 16 cage needed a 9.

In the end, we learn that the biggest cage of all was Nicolas Cage.

01:00:04 for me. Great puzzle! Enjoyed it much! Kind comment.

68:19 for me. Interesting puzzle!

I was so proud of myself when I got even one digit in this puzzle, lol

24:42 for me. Fantastic puzzle!!

64:03 for me. Found it almost too hard, so really glad that I got it.

wow, that was pretty hard, started ez, then ofc I forgot about the "all different sizes" rule... nevertheless, a bit over 1 hr and a lot of enjoyment

When Simon places his 1st digit in the puzzle at 35:34 the 9 in box 7 has only 1 square I wonder how long it takes to spot this. Still great solve of a really good puzzle

43:08 - "I don't know what the snape of the shake is..." ALMOST Simmon (*) 2024. (*) - If you know, you know.

@21:00 r1c3 could have been the end of the snake right? If it were a one-cell-cage?

FoW puzzles do not work for me anymore on the Sven Sudoku pad. Anyone else has this problem?

One obvious clue you missed (but still managed without), is that the revealed white cells that aren't part of a cage aren't in the snake. But it ended up not being that significant anyway, soo... Good job!

Yowza. Got through it, but totally overlooked the super obvious 135 being ruled out by the 5 next to the nine cage. Duh!?

The puzzle is so much easier when one notices the 9 in 7th box early on 😅

AstralSky was smart and evil for doing this a fog puzzle! 😅

Got the 9 is box 7 - R8C2 as first digit after forcing the 1234’s into box 7 C7. Very odd first FOW cell ID.

41:18 - 1:08:37

58:49 today. I made so many mistakes that it is not even funny. I had to fix at least 10 of them. My marking kept getting in the way, but i was too stubborn to redo it, that i hurt the solve time.

Sadly I messed up boxes 8 and 9 and had to give up due to fog giving away information

36:28 1:08:37 r8c2 has been there for ages

Lots of roping in the final solution to this one

Had the so got glitchey for anyone else? Mine keeps duplicating parts of the grid...

Didnt. They have to be different cages why are there two 16 cages? Or do they mean different lengths?

Phenomenal puzzle, but Simon's pencil marks were atrocious and probably kept him from solving the puzzle faster.

32:22 for me.

50:03 for me.

68:19 for me

At 1:16:05 why does that square have to be a 5 and not a 3?