85 minutes to do today's -3 to +3 all because my mind got stuck on only one solution for the -4+ cage

Today's -3 to +3, as always seems to have a "key cage".........today's ( I think) was the cage of: e5,e6 and f6......it took quite awhile as I did most of puzzle and then "ran into" this cage.........looking at the rest of the puzzle my best guess involved a couple of 3's.......then struggled with rest of puzzle for next 20 minutes and then after looking at some of the other areas of the puzzle that was affected, decided "my guess" was "way" wrong.......for those who do try this puzzle I think that cage was the "key".......would like to know if others found the same or something different.

Hi Beaker,
When I have this issue, I often avoid that “key” cage until the end.
There can be too many possibilities.

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As I looked back to when I saved that puzzle, I had most of row 2 done. The only 2 cells I had left belonged to the 4- cage, and I knew what those two numbers had to be

I also had most of row 3 completed. And that forced the number in 3D.

Then you still have to solve the rest of the puzzle to get the proper order of the two numbers in row 2.

I will send you a PM describing my approach
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ETA : I am doing the wrong puzzle. There is no -4 + cage in the Extra puzzle.

I think I just did my best time for this type of puzzle......quite lucky I think....7.6 minutes

another 7.716 minutes....woohoo...... .....now, time to relax in front of TV.....puts me to sleep!!)

Well done beaker. I always used to struggle with negative numbers, particularly the subtraction cages, where the order in which you do the subtraction affects the result. I've got a bit better at doing them, but they can be quite time consuming and it's easy to get confused.

So true......I usually have to experiment with various cages writing the possibilities on paper and comparing them to each other and how to fit them on the puzzle.......but this one, I simply thought I would try on the screen with " 0 " s first and the other given numbers and for some reason, everything I tried worked........I usually have to spend 25 to 30 minutes on these because of the negative numbers........I dread every time I have to do one of these as I always think that this is the 1st one I don' get.......so far, so good ..........I still have trouble with the 8x8's when numbers are zero to seven and only get about 75% of them

Concentrating on the zeroes definitely helps. I usually bold the zero cells, so that the pattern stands out.