Welcome to Fruit Sudoku! It's classic Sudoku with fruit instead of numbers: fill every row, column and box with one of each of the nine fruits.
Prefer good old numbers? You're only two taps away. Open Settings, choose the Classic theme, and every puzzle switches to 1β9, including one you're partway through.
How To Play Fruit Sudoku
Fill the grid so that every row, every column and every 3Γ3 box contains each of the nine fruits exactly once. Nine rows, nine columns, nine boxes, nine fruits: no repeats anywhere.
Some cells start filled in. These clues sit on a slightly darker background and can't be changed. Every puzzle has exactly one answer, and you can always reach it by logic, without guessing, except on Extreme puzzles.
The fruits are only symbols. There's no arithmetic, and π isn't "worth" more than π. You can switch to numbers, animals, alphabets and more in Settings, and the puzzle stays the same.
Placing a fruit
- Tap an empty cell to select it. Its row, column and box light up so you can see what it has to fit with.
- Tap the big fruit on a pad key to place it.
- To remove it, tap the same fruit again, or tap Erase.
Pencil marks
Each pad key has a small, faded copy of its fruit on the right. Tap that small copy to add a pencil mark, a note that the fruit might go in this cell. Pencil marks sit in a tiny 3Γ3 layout inside the cell. Tap the small fruit again to remove its mark, or use Erase to clear all of them.
When you place a fruit, the game removes that fruit's pencil marks from the rest of its row, column and box. You can turn this off in Settings.
The buttons
- Erase clears the selected cell: first the fruit, then its pencil marks.
- Hint fills in the selected cell with the right fruit. With no cell selected, it picks the cell that's easiest to work out next.
- Check marks any fruit you've placed in the wrong cell with a red dot. Nothing is locked; fix it or leave it.
- Undo and Redo (the arrows at the top) step back and forward through every change, including pencil marks and hints.
Hints and checks are unlimited and there's no timer. Play however you enjoy it.
Finding a fruit
Tap a pad key with no cell selected and every cell holding that fruit lights up, including pencil marks. Tap the key again to turn it off. Selecting a filled cell does the same for its fruit.
Choosing a puzzle
Open the menu (β°, top left):
- Library holds 180 ready-made puzzles in five difficulties. Solved puzzles get a check mark, and ones you've started get a dot. You can leave a puzzle and come back to it later.
- My puzzles holds puzzles you've entered or edited yourself.
- New makes a brand-new puzzle at any difficulty, or opens the editor.
Restart puzzle at the bottom of the menu clears your entries. You can undo it.
Difficulty
- Easy: every step is a single obvious placement.
- Medium: needs pencil marks and simple patterns, like pairs.
- Hard: needs bigger patterns, such as triples and the X-Wing.
- Expert: needs advanced patterns, such as the Swordfish.
- Extreme: beyond the standard techniques, so you may need trial and error.
Each puzzle is graded by the hardest step it needs, not by how many clues it has.
Entering a puzzle from a newspaper or book
- Open the menu, go to New, and choose Blank puzzle. The editor uses digits so you can copy puzzles straight in.
- Tap a cell, then a number. Clues that clash turn red.
- Tap Save. The game checks that the puzzle has exactly one answer, tells you its difficulty, and lets you name it.
- Choose Save & play. Your puzzle appears in your own theme's fruit, or whatever symbols you've chosen.
You can also choose Edit this puzzle to start from any puzzle's clues and change them.
Controls
Keyboard
- 1β9: place the 1stβ9th symbol
- Shift + 1β9: pencil mark
- Arrow keys: move the selection
- Backspace: erase
- H: hint
- C: check
- Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y: undo and redo
Settings (βοΈ)
Open Settings with the settings button. Changes apply right away, even partway through a puzzle, and are remembered on this device.
Theme
A theme sets the nine symbols you play with and the colours and background around them. The puzzle underneath never changes, so switching themes mid-game just redraws your progress in the new symbols.
- Fruit is the default. Classic uses plain numbers 1β9, and Keycaps shows them as emoji keys.
- Picture sets include plants, faces, smileys, animals, birds, insects, sea life, vehicles, instruments, balls, hands, clocks and moons.
- Colour sets include hearts, circles and squares.
- Writing and symbol sets include Greek, Armenian, Chinese numerals, Kangxi radicals, Katakana, Devanagari (Sanskrit) and Gujarati digits, Hebrew letters (Tetragram), Glagolitic, Bamum, Braille, planetary symbols, flags, arrows and two mahjong tile sets.
Some themes use symbols that not every phone or computer can display. Those themes are hidden automatically, and a note at the bottom of the list says how many.
The puzzle editor always shows digits, whatever theme you pick, so puzzles from a newspaper or book are easy to copy in.
Remove pencil marks automatically
On by default. When you place a symbol, it's removed from the pencil marks in the same row, column and box, since it can't go there any more. Turn this off if you prefer to manage every mark yourself. Either way, undo restores anything that was removed.
Highlight matching symbols
On by default. Selecting a filled cell lights up every other copy of that symbol on the board, including in pencil marks. This makes it easy to see where a fruit already is and where it still needs to go. Turned off, only the selected cell's row, column and box are highlighted.
You can always highlight a symbol by tapping its pad key with no cell selected, whether this setting is on or not.
Sound and dark mode
Sound and dark mode are set for all Cheery Chimp games, not just this one. In dark mode, the page turns black, the buttons and text turn white, and the board keeps its theme with softened colours.
Accessibility
See the Controls section for keyboard navigation controls.
Strategy
Every puzzle except Extreme can be solved by logic alone. The techniques below go from the ones every puzzle uses to the ones only Expert puzzles need. Each difficulty level in the game is named for the hardest technique it requires, so this guide follows the same order.
One word you'll see a lot: a unit is any row, column or 3Γ3 box. Every unit must end up holding each of the nine fruits once.
Getting started
- Start with the fruit that appears most. Tap its pad key with no cell selected to light up every copy. The more copies there are, the fewer places the rest can go.
- Work box by box. For a single box, ask which fruits it's missing and where each one could go.
- Keep going round. Each fruit you place opens up new chances elsewhere, so sweep the whole grid again after every few placements.
- Pencil marks are worth it. Easy puzzles can be solved in your head. From Medium up, writing down every possible fruit for each empty cell makes the patterns below visible.
Easy: singles
Hidden single
Look at one unit and one fruit. If there's only one cell in that unit where the fruit can go, it goes there, even if that cell could hold other fruits too.
Example: the top-left box needs a π. Strawberries already sit in the first and second rows elsewhere on the grid, and in the first column. That rules out every empty cell in the box except one, so the π goes there.
Naked single
Look at one cell. Cross off every fruit already in its row, column and box. If only one fruit is left, that's the answer.
Hidden singles are usually easier to spot by eye. Naked singles become obvious once you have pencil marks: any cell with a single mark is solved.
Medium: using pencil marks
Pointing (locked candidates)
If, inside one box, every possible spot for a fruit lies in the same row, then that fruit must go somewhere in that part of the row. So you can remove it from the rest of that row outside the box. The same works for columns.
Example: in the middle box, π can only go in two cells, and both are in row 5. Whichever one it ends up in, the rest of row 5 can't have π. Erase the π pencil marks from row 5 in the other two boxes.
Claiming
The reverse of pointing. If, in a row or column, every possible spot for a fruit falls inside one box, then that box's copy of the fruit must be in that row or column. Remove it from the rest of the box.
Naked pair
Two cells in the same unit that both hold only the same two pencil marks, say π and π, must share those two fruits between them. You don't know which is which yet, but no other cell in that unit can have π or π. Erase those marks everywhere else in the unit.
Hidden pair
If two fruits can only go in the same two cells of a unit, those two cells belong to those two fruits. Any other pencil marks in those two cells can be erased.
Hard: bigger patterns
Naked and hidden triples
The pair ideas stretched to three. Three cells in a unit whose pencil marks, taken together, contain only three fruits (like ππ, ππ and ππ) must hold exactly those three. Remove those fruits from the unit's other cells. A cell in a triple doesn't need all three marks.
A hidden triple is three fruits that can only go in the same three cells of a unit. Clear every other mark from those cells.
X-Wing
Pick one fruit. Find two rows where that fruit has exactly two possible cells, and those cells line up in the same two columns, forming a rectangle.
In the first row the fruit goes in one of the two corners, and in the second row it goes in the opposite column. Either way, both columns get their copy from these two rows, so you can remove that fruit from everywhere else in those two columns. The same trick works with rows and columns swapped.
XY-Wing
This uses three cells that each have exactly two pencil marks:
- a pivot with ππ
- one wing that shares a unit with the pivot and holds ππ₯
- another wing that shares a unit with the pivot and holds ππ₯
If the pivot is π, the first wing must be π₯. If the pivot is π, the second wing must be π₯. So one of the wings is always π₯, and any cell that sees both wings can't be π₯.
Expert: advanced patterns
Naked and hidden quads
The same pattern with four cells and four fruits. They're rare and easy to miss, so check your crowded units for them when nothing else works.
Swordfish (and Jellyfish)
The X-Wing with three rows instead of two. Pick one fruit, and find three rows where it has only two or three possible cells, all falling within the same three columns. Those three rows supply that fruit to those three columns, so remove it from the rest of those columns.
A Jellyfish is the same idea with four rows and four columns. Rows and columns can be swapped for both.
XYZ-Wing
This is like the XY-Wing, but the pivot has three marks, πππ₯, and the wings hold ππ₯ and ππ₯. The wing fruit π₯ always ends up in the pivot or one of the wings. So you can remove π₯ only from cells that see all three: the pivot and both wings.
Extreme: when logic runs dry
Extreme puzzles go beyond every technique above. Stronger solvers use chains, but trial and error works too:
- Find a cell with just two pencil marks.
- Pick one and keep solving.
- If you hit a contradiction, such as a cell with no fruit left or two of the same fruit in a unit, the other mark was right. Use Undo to step back to the choice.
Check also helps: it tells you whether your guess is wrong, so you can back out before going too far.
General habits
- Keep pencil marks honest. A missing mark hides the answer, and a wrong one creates a pattern that isn't really there. Placing a fruit clears its marks from the same row, column and box automatically. You still need to remove marks yourself after using a technique.
- Singles first, always. After any elimination, look for new singles before hunting for bigger patterns.
- Stuck? Change what you're looking at. Switch between thinking about one fruit across the grid and one cell's options.
