Grown-up here means two things. The puzzles ask for real reasoning rather than a quick scan, and the logic grid stories are about adult life: a book club, an interview day, a Thanksgiving potluck, a film festival.
What's in the collection
- Logic grids: 8 stories at 4×5 and 5×5, six medium and two hard, including Trivia Night, Interview Day and The Cooking Class.
- Killer sudoku: 8 puzzles, four medium and four hard, where the cage sums replace the given digits.
- Nonograms: 8 grids at 15×15, four medium and four hard.
- Kakuro: 8 puzzles on a 10×10 board, four medium and four hard.
- Calcudoku: 8 puzzles, four hard 6×6 grids and four medium 9×9 grids, using all four operations.
Choosing where to start
If you like words more than numbers, start with the logic grids. They read like a short story with a twist at the end, and the only arithmetic is the occasional clue such as paid two dollars more than or arrived an hour later. The medium ones reward patience with either/or clues; the two hard ones add exact differences and comparisons that have to be chased across the grid.
Sudoku players should go straight to the killer sudoku tab. The hard puzzles there need rule of 45 sums over several cells and innies and outies across two or three rows, which is where killer sudoku stops feeling like a sudoku with sums and becomes its own puzzle.
The nonograms suit anyone who would rather not count at all, beyond the clues themselves. Hard 15×15 grids each contain at least one line that only full line logic can crack.
For people who like arithmetic
Kakuro and calcudoku are both number puzzles, but they feel different. Kakuro is about combinations: which digits make 23 in three cells, and where two runs cross. Calcudoku is about rows and columns, with sums, products, differences and quotients tying cells together. The hard kakuro need pairs within a run and remainder reasoning on the last two cells; the hard 6×6 calcudoku need line totals, since every row adds to 21 and multiplies to 720.
If those two are your favorites, the number puzzles for adults collection puts kakuro, calcudoku and killer sudoku side by side.
Printing the set
Every puzzle here has a Print PDF button, and the printable set for this page gathers four of the logic grids into one PDF with the answers on the last pages. Print it, find a pencil and keep a soft eraser nearby for the hard ones.
All of these puzzles are proven to have exactly one solution and graded by the techniques a person needs, so medium and hard mean the same thing here as everywhere else on the site.