If you’re like us at the Curio & Co. studios, you’re solving sudoku puzzles on a regular basis (the two of us are enjoying them each morning with coffee) and you’re no newbie. In fact, your solving times are getting shorter and shorter. A Tricky grid that used to take eleven minutes now maybe takes six. (How fast are you breezing through the Casual grids? Don’t worry, I keep saying we need to work on badges.) It’s clear that you’re better at this than you were in May.
But then you try the day’s Fierce puzzle and keep getting stuck. Not stuck three quarters of the way through. Stuck near the top, with no idea what the next move is supposed to be. You can’t even say where you’ve gone wrong, because you haven’t entered a single number yet.
Can you get better at sudoku? Yes! And you can get better in two different ways. The first is the easiest, and it will seem like the skills come to you: the more puzzles you do, the more familiar the patterns become, and the faster you get. The second way to get better at sudoku can feel like a secret if you’ve just been casually solving puzzles up to now: You go out and get the skills. It turns out, you can learn the techniques you need.
But a quick warning before we go further. There are some technical names ahead, and if you’ve never heard of them (I certainly hadn’t), don’t worry. It’s kind of the whole point of this article.
You are already getting faster
The easy way to get better requires no learning; it’s just volume. Do a lot of puzzles and you’ll start to see your progress. You’re faster at scanning the grid, you make fewer mistakes, and at some point you stop checking for what’s missing and just see it instead. And the great thing is no one has to teach you any of that. It comes naturally from solving puzzles repeatedly, the way most pleasant skills arrive.
The catch here is that all of that practice is just improving what you can already do. The skills you already have will keep producing satisfying results more or less indefinitely, but the hardest puzzle you can solve will remain exactly where it was in May. This is why a plateau is so hard to spot from the inside. Your times are still falling, but you’re not adding to your toolbox of techniques.
Difficulty is a measure of technique
The sudoku puzzles from Curio & Co. are rated using Sudoku Explainer, which scores a puzzle by the hardest technique required to solve it. Not how long it takes you or how many steps you need. They’re rated by the single most demanding thing you need to know.
So a Casual grid doesn’t ask for more than a simple scan, the sort where you notice that only one particular square can hold a seven. But once you move up to a Challenging puzzle you eventually face an X-Wing, which is a pattern formed by four cells sitting at the corners of a rectangle, and it’s either a shape you recognize or you don’t.
That means that no amount of Casual or Tricky puzzles will ever teach you an X-Wing, because neither one, by definition, ever includes it. You could solve a thousand Tricky puzzles and the shape won’t come up once. This is actually great news. Because it means that the barrier isn’t effort or hours or patience. It’s just a specific piece of knowledge that you don’t have. Yet.
You can learn the techniques
Six months ago, I wouldn’t have thought there was anything to learn. You just waited for a flash of brilliance. (And waited.) But there are techniques, you can learn most of them in an afternoon, and some of them have gloriously unhelpful names, which we get into on the rules page. (Along with why so many of them are fish.)
The key is to solve one level above where you’re comfortable, not at it. The level you enjoy is, almost by definition, the level with nothing left to teach you. By all means celebrate the falling number on the timer, but know that it can hide the fact that you’ve stopped climbing.
But you don’t have to
The best thing about puzzles is that there are no obligations. You can enjoy them however you like. Solve for speed or solve for difficulty, or don’t even finish them at all. The free daily puzzles at Curio & Co. don’t come with grades, and no one is checking your work.
But if the idea of higher levels appeals to you, it helps to know what you might find up there. So our puzzles are sorted into five levels, each with its own Sudoku Explainer rating, which will point to the kind of techniques you might need.
And since volume is a part of the process, our Sudoku Solvers Club holds the archive of every puzzle we’ve published since January 2026. That’s over a thousand puzzles and solutions, more than two hundred at each of the five levels, with enough Challenging grids to properly get the hang of X-Wings. Or whichever technique turns out to be the one standing between you and the next level. It’s three euros a month, ad-free, and printable if you’d rather work in pencil.
You could start in January and work forward. Which is, I think, a perfectly good way to spend a year.
