Easy sudoku – today's 4 free puzzles

The rules of sudoku fit in three lines

Sudoku is famously simple to learn. You fill a 9×9 grid with the digits 1 to 9, and there are only three promises to keep: no digit twice in the same row, no digit twice in the same column, and no digit twice inside a bold-bordered 3×3 box. That is the entire rulebook. There is no arithmetic: nothing is added, multiplied or carried. All you need is the patience to ask, "what can go here?" That is why the puzzle travels so well: an eight-year-old and a ninety-year-old can share the same grid, and neither needs to speak the same language as the person who wrote it.

Where do you make your first move?

Staring at a fresh grid and freezing is the classic beginner moment. The cure is to stop looking at the empty space and start looking at the crowds.

Step 1: find the fullest box

Scan the nine 3×3 boxes and find one that already holds seven or eight digits. With one or two cells left, the answer is almost handed to you: count 1, 2, 3… and spot which digits are missing.

Step 2: scan a single digit across the grid

Next, pick the digit that appears most often on the board — say there are six 5s. Find a box with no 5 yet, then trace the rows and columns that cut through it. "This row already has a 5, this column has one too… so the 5 can only go here." That elimination is called scanning, and every easy puzzle on this site can be solved with scanning alone, from the first cell to the last.

Step 3: use notes when you're torn

If a cell has two or three candidates and none of them is forced, don't guess. Switch on notes and pencil the candidates in small. As neighbouring cells fill in, those lists shrink on their own. When you want the full toolkit, the sudoku techniques guide walks through everything in order.

Three mistakes almost every beginner makes

The first is checking the row and the column but forgetting the box. Before you commit a digit, say "row clear, column clear, box clear": a two-second habit that removes nearly every error. The second is guessing. A proper sudoku has exactly one solution, so a single "probably this one" poisons the grid; the contradiction usually surfaces twenty moves later, when you can no longer tell where it went wrong. Filling in only the cells you can prove looks slower and is in fact the shortest route. The third is jumping to hard puzzles too early. The joy of sudoku lives in the moment you crack a grid on your own, so spend your first week entirely on easy puzzles and stack up those wins.

Good for kids, good at ninety

Sudoku is a hands-on exercise in forming a hypothesis and testing it: logical thinking with a friendly face. Because it needs digits rather than words, it suits children who are still learning to read, and it makes a comfortable daily habit for older solvers who want to keep their minds busy. If the full 9×9 grid still feels wide, start on our mini sudoku in 4×4 and 6×6 sizes. The rules are identical, so stepping up to 9×9 later feels like nothing changed but the size.

A daily habit beats a long session

This site publishes 20 new sudoku puzzles every day, four of them at this easy level. One with your morning coffee, one before bed: five minutes a day for a month and you will be astonished at how quickly the grid opens up. Improving at sudoku takes no special talent: a little faster than yesterday, a little less hesitation, repeated. When four easy puzzles start feeling thin, that is your graduation notice, move on to medium sudoku and learn to work with candidate notes. If you'd rather use a pencil, there are printable sudoku sheets too.