Sudoktive: Detective Sudoku

Two detective cases where the puzzles are not a break from the investigation. They are the investigation. A cryptographer is dead in a study locked from the inside. An insurance inspector finds a chart of a bay that does not exist — it did once, and somebody spent fifty-two years taking it off the map. THE INVESTIGATION BOARD Your case is a corkboard of pinned photographs joined by red string. Solve a lead and the leads behind it come out of the dark. Some threads run parallel for a while, then reconverge on a deduction you cannot reach until you have worked more than one angle. Nothing arrives in order. PUZZLES THAT ARE ACTUALLY GRADED Counting givens is a poor measure of difficulty — a grid with forty clues can be harder than one with thirty. These are sorted by the techniques a solve genuinely requires, checked before they ship, and drawn by band rather than fixed per lead. Replay a node and you get a fresh grid. Every puzzle is solvable by logic alone: you never have to guess. THE MIDNIGHT CIPHER A cryptographer found dead surrounded by encoded messages. Detective Mara Cross must decipher the trail of numbers before the killer strikes again. Free. 39 nodes. THE CARTOGRAPHER'S WIDOW An insurance inspector sent to close a routine death claim in a coastal town, who finds the dead man's last chart is wrong on purpose. 65 nodes, and more than one way for it to end. NO NOISE No advertising. No energy meters, no lives, no waiting to play. No countdown pushing you to buy your way past a grid. No account, no sign-in, and no data collected about you. The first case is free. The second is one purchase, and it stays yours.