DevLog #009 — I Didn’t Build a Sudoku Encyclopedia
The easiest part of building Learn was making the first list.
What is Sudoku. How to play it. Pencil marks. Naked singles and hidden singles. Every Sudoku site needs some version of those pages, and ours needed them too. Someone who has never played needs a way in before any of the stranger rules mean anything.
I could have kept going from there forever. Every technique has a name. Every variant has its own rule. There is always another list of advanced strategies waiting after the last one.
That would have made Learn look complete. It would not have told me why this site existed.
The question I kept coming back to was smaller: what can Sudoku Fog add after the reader has found the ordinary explanation somewhere else?
I narrowed it to the part where a familiar rule changes because some of the board is hidden, and the variants that already matter inside the game: King’s Move, Anti-Knight, X-Sudoku, Kropki, and Thermometer.
That gave the section two layers.
The first layer teaches each variant on its own terms. A reader who searched for one of these variants should get a useful introduction without having to care about my app first. That is why the Kropki page explains what the black and white dots allow, and why the absence of a dot matters too. It is a Sudoku lesson before it is anything else.
The second layer is still waiting. That is where fog meets those variants: what changes when the diagonal you need, the thermometer segment you need, or the cell that would settle a Kropki pair is not visible yet.
I am not writing that layer just because it would make the catalogue longer. First I want to see whether anyone finds the first one, and whether they stay long enough to use it. The site has had enough untested plans already.
For now, the boundary is useful. The basic articles give people a way in. The variant articles give them a reason to stay. The fog-specific articles, if they earn their place, should give them something they cannot get from an ordinary Sudoku explanation.
If any of those paths makes a reader curious enough to try Sudoku Fog afterwards, that is the connection I am trying to earn.