I enjoy playing Sudoku, and have for a long time. It’s not a daily habit or anything, but every once in a while I get the Sudoku bug and search out some puzzles to solve. Most recently this happened to me a month or so ago after seeing the viral Miracle Sudoku video. I popped over to the App Store and searched out a handful of Sudoku apps to play, some of which I’d already downloaded before but had since gotten rid of.
Why was that? Why was it so hard to find an app featuring one of the most popular games types in the world that made you want to stick with it? It’s not that there aren’t some very good Sudoku apps out there, because there are. But the problem for someone like me is that they tend to skew too far in the easy direction or too far in the hard direction for a casual player, and it’s rare to find an app that has intuitive mechanics and UI. Most Sudoku apps are cumbersome and a chore to play.
Developer Zach Gage is known for taking tried and true gameplay mechanics and putting unique spins on them in order to create new and wonderful experiences. His games are also known for having elegant and intuitive UIs and in general are just a pleasure to use. In the case of Sudoku it wasn’t so much that the game itself needed some sort of twist, but the way that game was delivered to you in a mobile app needed to be rethought from the ground up. And so that brings us to Good Sudoku, a new Sudoku game for iOS from Zach Gage and Jack Schlesinger.
The game’s official website does a good job at highlighting what Good Sudoku does differently than other Sudoku apps that makes it a more enjoyable experience for players of all experience levels. One of the biggies is that an advanced AI assistant is built right into the game and can offer you help in all sorts of situations that you may find yourself in, so if you get stuck and ask for help it won’t simply show you the correct answer but it will offer you advice on what the correct answer should be and most importantly why that is the answer and how you arrive to it.
The second thing that stands out to me about Good Sudoku is the tools the developers have built into the game to make text entry and UI navigation as simple as possible so you can focus entirely on solving the puzzles themselves. Things like only showing you numbers that are possible in a given based on what’s already on the board, so you don’t have to constantly be counting numbers or figuring out which rows or columns already have certain numbers in them to determine which numbers might go in any given square. I’ve been playing an early version of Good Sudoku for a few days now and, let me tell you, I don’t think I can go back to playing any other Sudoku app after this.
There’s plenty more to Good Sudoku, like a puzzle generator with more than 70,000 puzzles to play, global leaderboards, and even a custom puzzle creator, but you’ll have to wait to find out the rest for yourself. Thankfully that wait won’t be long as Good Sudoku is set to launch this Thursday, July 23rd.
