As someone who tries (somewhat obsessively) to solve all the puzzles every day, I knew that my recent visit to New Zealand with my wife to visit our daughter was going to present something of a challenge. And so it proved to be, particularly on the days when I was travelling to and from New Zealand.

So I tried to concentrate on the daily puzzles and park the extras until I had more time to deal with them. Then I had a few days away last week and this caused further disruption. So I found myself a couple of days ago with only a couple of days left to solve the extra 15x15 dated 8 March 2025.

I wanted to avoid falling further behind in the year to date rankings, so I worked hard on solving this puzzle only to find with a few cells to go that I had gone wrong somewhere along the way. So I started again from scratch and somehow managed to solve it a few minutes ago, with just over three hours to spare. Phew!

I can’t decide whether the 15x15 puzzles are particularly difficult or just particularly long. I was the 102nd person to solve that particular puzzle and this seems to be around par for the course. What would be nice would be if Patrick could leave these puzzles up for another day after they are no longer worth points so that those of us who were stymied could see where we went wrong. Just a thought …

Likely just the size. My solver solves it with 17 applications of cage-line intersection and no advanced techniques. However a lot of these are "claiming candidates", meaning the only instance of a digit N in a row/column is within one cage, therefore the cage must contain that digit. This requires the combinations of each cage in that row/column to be computed & noted which is not how most people solve these huge puzzles, barring certain exceptions, for example it is easy to notice when only 1 cage in a row in a 6x6 puzzle can contain a 5.

Solve log may be found here.

I only really do the 15x15 once a year for the achievement so I may not have a proper sample, but usually I find that there's no super advanced logic involved, just chugging through the big amount of stuff.

now I want to go back and check it. It was early in March, and I didn't have ones that stumped my until later in the month. For me, when I am facing the 24 hour deadline, my anxiety level rises and I am not clear headed when it comes to solving these puzzles.

I have also been traveling and had other demands on my time. I wondered if Patrick did something lie some newspapers do with their crosswords. The first week of the month is their easiest puzzles of the month, and the last week of the month are the hardest puzzles of the month.

no, no such thing in effect