I had toyed with soduko a few months ago, but got frustrated at the hard level of the app I was using.
I have to explain something: “EASY” is extremly relative, to say the least. The “free” app I used, the EASY level was pathetic. When I got a paid app, which is much more enjoyable, the VERY EASY is more difficult than the EASY of the “free” app. Much more akin to the free app’s medium level.
The paid app, In can still do the VERY EASY with no notes, but much more time consuming.
But I got tired of sudoku after 2 solid days of playing… for that day I mean, and played a game if chess…
Holy cow, my ability to concentrate and visualise the board was insane after playing sudoku.
That being said, harder sudoku problems don’t help my chess, since it’s more intensive and requires notes, so they don’t use the same parts of the brain as chess… at least, harder sudoku uses my brain sufficiantly different from chess anyway.
Spoiler alert: If you want to work out the solution yourself, look only at the first post in the thread. Actually, you could look at the first five. The first hint appears in the sixth post.
a search indicates it may have been in a 2011 Chess Life for Kids.
The problem was for each of the nine 3x3 squares, each of the nine rows and each of the nine columns to have a black king, black pawn, white king, white pawn, white bishop, white rook and three empty squares with no king in check.
One thought I had on chess and sudoku was that it was a two-stage puzzle. In the first stage, you were just placing pieces like you would place digits in sudoku. Once you’ve done that, then some of the pieces would disappear along with one row and one column, leaving an 8 x 8 board with a ‘mate in 1’ puzzle or something along those lines.
That way you get the people who are just there for the sudoku part and you can hopefully entice them into solving the chess part of the puzzle.