SudoClue for a Cold Winter’s Night

The holiday break is nigh, which means you need to be careful not to catch a cold.

For many people, the time preceding a holiday, vacation, or spring break is busy — finishing up a term paper, completing holiday shopping, or getting things off your desk so you can enjoy your trip to Tahiti. During that time, your immunity kicks into high gear. It helps to fend off germs while you’re pushing yourself to get stuff done. When your break finally comes, though, you relax, and your body thinks, “Oh, cool, the stress is over.” And BAM! No more immunity, and your body succumbs to infection. Sniffles, headache, and a cough ensue.

How can you prevent this?

Easy. Do puzzles.

That’s right. You can trick your body into thinking that you’re still stressed by doing crosswords, sudoku, nurikabe, battleship, nonogrids, or whatever you like. Your mind is working hard, so your body keeps your immunity up. Doing something you enjoy fends off disease. Win-win.

Well, MJ4MF is here to help. The following SudoClue puzzle will provide a half-hour of much-needed stress. The idea is rather simple. Use the clues to fill in the corresponding squares of the 6 × 6 grid, then fill in the remaining squares like a sudoku puzzle.

The puzzle below, as well as an easier version, are available in PDF format.

SudoClue Puzzle – Easy       SudoClue Puzzle – Hard

Enjoy!

1. Number of unique tetrominoes
2. Product of all single-digit divisors of 143
3. Number of English words that end with –dous
4. Half of π², approximately
5. Number of tetrominoes that can be drawn without lifting your pencil from the paper
6. 0!
7. Number in the title of the greatest math joke book ever
8. Integer between e and π
9. Circumference divided by radius, to the nearest whole number
10. Smallest number of colors sufficient to color all planar maps
11. V
12. Side length of a square whose area (in square units) is equal to its perimeter (in units)
13. A perfect number
14. A hat trick
15. For integer values of n, the smallest prime divisor of n² + n
16. Number of total handshakes when four people shake hands with each other

Don’t feel like thinking too much on holiday break? Fine, here’s a hint. And if you’ve already fully entered holiday break mode, here’s the solution.