Daily Sudoku - 20 May 2026

Añadido: 2026-05-25

[00:00:01]Hello and welcome to the Daily Gas for May 20th, 2026 called Encaged for Sudoku by Bill Murphy.

[00:00:10]Normal Sudoku rules apply.

[00:00:13]Each four in the grid must have only orthogonally adjacent odd digits.

[00:00:20]So, what does that mean?

[00:00:22]Well, if you take a look here, this is the variant that we got introduced to by Clover just, you know, about a week ago at this point.

[00:00:32]And then Clover gave us a similar puzzle with threes. So, in this case, orthogonally adjacent means that the two cells share an edge. So, in this case, if you looked at this two in box one, we would see that these four cells are orthogonally adjacent. They share an edge with the two. Two is an even digit.

[00:00:49]Four must only have orthogonally adjacent odd digits. So, the only neighbors that a four can have in the grid are odd. So, immediately that tells us without any fours pointing at this box, none of these four cells could be four because if they were four, then they would be sharing an edge with an even digit.

[00:01:14]And that's it. Those are the rules.

[00:01:17]Let's just jump right into it.

[00:01:23]All right. So, where do we want to start?

[00:01:30]Where do we want to start? I'm noticing that the corner boxes, 1, 3, 7, and 9 all have the same sort of thing going on. So, they will all have fours that are in some way related to each other here.

[00:01:59]I'm not exactly sure what that ends up looking like.

[00:02:07]Oh, oh my goodness. Actually, yeah, there's a couple applications of this and this is this is just super useful. Oh, even easier. Never mind. I was going to say I noticed like eight for example. Eight is going to have to go in one of these two cells. Well, that would mean this can't be four because if this was a four then this would be an eight and that would break. But, yes, that's one way to do it. I noticed the two did the same thing and then I realized, wait a second. We just have four twos staring here and that just immediately places two in the corner, which gives us the four here. Well, the corner of this box, not in the the true corner. So, we get four here. That gives us four here and that gets us a four in the true corner.

[00:02:48]Immediately then we know that the digits six and eight go in these three cells, right? Two of these three cells. Otherwise, these two cells here have to be odd. In this case, they can't be seven, so this is just a five-nine pair, which means this is a well, this can't be six or seven, so this is eight and then this will be a six-seven pair staring down.

[00:03:15]Three, only option for three is here.

[00:03:20]This will be either one or nine. Right now, I don't see a reason to place one or the other. I do, however, see a reason to place a six and a two and then we have a one-nine pair here, which will, with the five-nine pair here, give us nine in one of these three cells.

[00:03:45]Hmm.

[00:03:47]Okay, well, can we do the same thing over here? We can.

[00:03:50]Seven, just like the three, gets a seven here.

[00:03:55]Then, we know that again, this will be six, eight, and something. Six, eight, one, nine.

[00:04:02]So, once again, we're limited to one or nine here.

[00:04:10]And this can't be seven.

[00:04:12]So, down the column, this is seven here.

[00:04:20]Hmm.

[00:04:28]One, nine.

[00:04:34]So, hmm.

[00:04:37]What am I just not seeing here? There's probably just something really straightforward that will resolve it all. Well, six, okay, here we go. Six does give us six and seven.

[00:04:50]So, we can do that.

[00:04:55]Two, seven, nine. We get two and seven, but four is not going to save us. This does need to be odd, though. So, those are also the considerations, right? Odd, odd, odd, odd.

[00:05:06]We can only have one more odd here. And where can four go? Well, four only has two options, and four can't go next to eight. So, actually, four just has to go here, which means all of these are odd, which means this is two and six.

[00:05:20]There we are. I need to I need to protect my fours. Four. That's what we were missing. Four can't go next to the two. Four goes here. It's so obvious now in hindsight. This will be four, and this will be four.

[00:05:32]And again, we ask the question, how do we, quote-unquote, protect our four? In this case, um this is odd. So, actually, this has to be eight.

[00:05:44]These are all even. So, where does the six go? Six goes here, and then these will be the last of our odd digits.

[00:05:57]And do I resolve the 1 5? Hmm.

[00:06:04]Well, we know eight has to go in one of these two cells. So, this is certainly eight.

[00:06:08]1 3 5 though three, there we are. This is three.

[00:06:15]1 5 1 5 1 then six eight then 1 9. 1 9 does leave us with three though.

[00:06:37]three We're missing 5 9 here.

[00:06:44]This is Oh, well, what can this be? This can only be one because otherwise we're missing six and eight and neither of those can go next to the four.

[00:06:52]Six gets a six here. We do have to consider four in the center which now is so obvious. Eight is going to be eight here.

[00:07:01]two Two will be in one of these two cells.

[00:07:05]Um neither of those will touch a four, so it has to be something with two here.

[00:07:10]Oh, and of course we knew that this was 2 7 9, and we said it was a chocolate teapot, but with this four placed this can't be two, this can't be two. So, this is two. We can resolve, or I guess it wasn't a true chocolate teapot because of the nine, but now we can place nine and five.

[00:07:30]Then then 5 9 3 9, this is nine.

[00:07:39]three This is 5 9. 5 9 137 This is I don't think we actually know.

[00:07:49]We know this is seven though. Oh, we do know cuz this is one, this is three.

[00:07:54]From the column we're missing nine.

[00:07:56]91 Nine gets us nine and five, five gets us five across.

[00:08:05]One and eight. One of course will go next to the four without even actually considering Sudoku there.

[00:08:11]We get one here to again protect our four. We need the two. We're missing the five.

[00:08:17]And we're almost done, folks.

[00:08:18]19 93 and finally five and nine and we are done in 7 minutes and 5 seconds with encaged four Sudoku by Bill Murphy.

[00:08:37]So, with that hopefully you enjoyed and thank you for watching.