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Good Sudoku
game
•7/26/2026

Good Sudoku

byZach Gage
App Store
8.6
The Verdict
"Good Sudoku is what happens when actual designers look at a genre that stopped trying in 2009. The puzzles aren't new — they can't be, that's the nature of sudoku — but the software around them is a category reset. The hint system alone justifies the download: it's the only implementation on the platform that treats getting stuck as a teaching opportunity rather than a monetization event, and it will measurably make you better at the game." "The $3.99 unlock is a bargain for what's behind it and a self-inflicted wound for how it's structured. Put dark mode in the free tier, and the most common complaint about this app evaporates overnight." "Buy it anyway. Nothing else in the category is close."

Key Features

The AI Hint System: The headline act. Rather than filling in a cell, the hint engine reads the current board state and your demonstrated skill level, then walks you through the technique that unlocks the next move — step by step, with visual annotation. It is a tutor, not a cheat button.
Technique-Labeled Difficulty: Every tier tells you what it will require. You know before you start whether a board wants a Hidden Pair or a Swordfish, so difficulty stops being a vague vibe and becomes a curriculum.
Drudgery Automation: Automatic candidate notes, smart highlighting, cascading eliminations and unlimited undo. The bookkeeping that makes hard sudoku tedious on paper is simply handled.
Three Modes + Dailies: Good for slow, deliberate solving; Arcade for fast scoring; Eternal for the endless variety; daily puzzles with global leaderboards for the competitive itch.
Practice Mode & Custom Import: Isolated drills for a single technique, plus an importer that ingests newspaper boards and variants like Miracle Sudoku.

The Good

Hint system genuinely teaches advanced techniques instead of revealing answers
Automation of notes, highlighting and cascading eliminations removes all clerical busywork
70,000+ hand-checked puzzles with transparent technique labeling per tier
Apple Design Award-caliber interface with zero perceptible input latency
Custom importer handles newspaper boards and variants like Miracle Sudoku

The Bad

Dark mode locked behind the $3.99 paywall — indefensible placement
Dense feature surface makes onboarding and re-onboarding cluttered
Automation genuinely alters the feel; paper purists will bristle
Free tier is thin enough to feel like a demo rather than a product
Arcade mode's scoring pressure undercuts the app's own teaching thesis

In-Depth Review

Bottom Line: Zach Gage and Jack Schlesinger took the most solved-out puzzle in human history and fixed everything around it, building a sudoku app that actually teaches you to be better at sudoku. The $3.99 paywall on dark mode is a petty blemish on an otherwise exceptional piece of software.

The Gameplay Loop

The core insight of Good Sudoku is that most of what you do in a sudoku app isn't solving. It's clerical work. Penciling candidates into eighty-one cells, erasing them one at a time as constraints tighten, squinting to see whether that 7 in row four is still viable. That's not puzzle-solving. That's data entry with a stylus.

Gage and Schlesinger strip it out. Turn on auto-notes and the grid populates every candidate for you; place a digit and the eliminations cascade across the row, column and box instantly. What remains is the part that requires a brain — pattern recognition. The result is a dramatically higher density of interesting decisions per minute. A hard puzzle that would take forty minutes on newsprint, most of it spent maintaining state, becomes a twelve-minute sequence of genuine deductions.

Purists hate this. There's a persistent minority in the App Store reviews arguing that the automation makes puzzles too easy, and they aren't wrong so much as they're measuring the wrong thing. Yes, the app removes difficulty — but it removes the difficulty of clerical accuracy, not the difficulty of logic. If your pleasure comes from the meditative rhythm of hand-marking a grid, the tools are optional and you can leave them off. That's the correct answer to the complaint, and Good Sudoku already implements it.

The Hint System Is the Product

Everything else is polish. This is the reason to install the app.

Standard sudoku hints are a moral failure. You get stuck, you tap the lightbulb, a number appears, and you have learned nothing except that you were stuck. It short-circuits the entire point of the exercise while draining a currency the app wants to sell you.

Good Sudoku's hint engine does the opposite. It evaluates the board, identifies the technique that actually resolves the current position, checks what you've already demonstrated you understand, and then teaches — highlighting the relevant cells, naming the pattern, explaining why the elimination is valid. When you hit the wall on an expert board, it doesn't rescue you. It shows you the shape of the thing you couldn't see.

The consequence is a genuine skill ramp. Players who started barely comfortable with Naked Pairs end up executing X-Wings, Swordfish, Jellyfish and XYZ-Wings — techniques that, on paper, live in obscure forum posts and PDF tutorials nobody finishes. Combine that with the practice mode's isolated drills and the technique-labeled difficulty tiers, and Good Sudoku becomes something rare in the puzzle category: software with a pedagogy. Most puzzle apps sell you content. This one builds capability, and the content is the delivery mechanism.

Modes and Structure

The three-mode split is smarter than it first appears. Good is the flagship: full toolset, no clock pressure, the mode where the teaching happens. Arcade inverts it — fast, scored, adrenal, closer to a twitch game than a logic puzzle. Eternal keeps the tap flowing indefinitely. Daily puzzles with leaderboards bolt on a light social layer without demanding an account-based friend graph.

The custom importer is the deep-cut feature and the one that signals real affection for the hobby. Typing in a newspaper grid to solve it with proper tools is a quality-of-life win. Importing a Miracle Sudoku — a variant that went viral on Cracking the Cryptic — and sharing it with a friend is fan service, and it lands.

Friction Points

Onboarding is dense. Between five tiers, three modes, practice drills, the importer and a toolbar of automation toggles, the first session presents a lot of surface. The app handles it reasonably, but a returning-after-two-months user will need a minute to reorient.

And the paywall is the real irritant — not that it exists, but where it sits. Dark mode is behind the $3.99 unlock. Charging for a full puzzle library and extra modes is entirely defensible. Charging for the ability to not have a white rectangle fired into your retinas at 11pm is the kind of decision that generates one-star reviews from people who would have happily paid, and it's the most-cited complaint in the ratings for good reason.

Editorial Disclaimer

The reviews and scores on this site are based on our editorial team's independent analysis and personal opinions. While we strive for objectivity, gaming experiences can be subjective. We are not compensated by developers for these scores.