We’re starting off our six part series of Best of 2022 posts with Sudoku, a puzzle category with 59 entries throughout the year as well as a place in many of our e-book releases including the Masterpiece Sudoku Mix series and the Grandmaster Puzzles Quarterly series.

As in years past, we selected the top Sudoku by reviewing FAVE votes, web comments, and tested comments. All of these puzzles are gathered in this PDF file.

Our first “best of” puzzle goes to a challenging Classic Sudoku by Ashish Kumar that had some unusual steps to get to the finish.

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Another top sudoku was the t-shirt puzzle by Thomas Snyder for the United States team at the recent World Sudoku and Puzzle Championships, with a very clean theme not needing any given digits.

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Guest constructor Jonas Gleim made a fantastic combination of Arrow and Thermo-Sudoku puzzles with this “Compass” Sunday Stumper from May that received a lot of favorite votes.

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A Thermo-Sudoku from Kishore Kumar Sridharan took the second overall Sudoku spot, with a “weighty” theme from the given dumbbell.

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Surprisingly, the top puzzle for the year was a new variation, Multiples Sudoku, and the “example” puzzle that Thomas Snyder wrote for the Sudoku Grand Prix round from the United States. We haven’t featured those puzzles here yet, but the fresh logic surrounding the two-digit placements got the attention of many solvers, earning the most votes to be our best of 2022 Sudoku.

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools)