Kaodoku
By Michel Colman

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Solving a “very easy” kaodoku

(For a harder example, click here)

If you are not used to solving kaodokus, even the very easy ones may seem very hard to solve at first sight. It may take you a while before you even find a single way of making progress. If you use the hints function in the kaodoku app, though, you will be surprised to see how many totally independent ways forward there are. It’s all just a matter of getting used to the symbols, and learning how to look at combinations of mouths or shapes instead of just full symbols. Take this “very easy” kaodoku, for example:

Very easy kaodoku

Here are some of the things you could have found at a glance, all independent from each other. You wouldn’t have needed to find all of these to solve the puzzle, this list is just to show you in how many ways you could have gotten started.

Using more elaborate logic you could find a few more, but we’l leave it at that for this easy example. So, with all these independent observations put together (all visible from the start), this is what the grid now looks like:

With pen marks

And of course lots of further avenues have opened up now. G1, F5, H5, E4, D9, E7, B5, E3, E9, D7, the mouth in A6, the neutral squares in row 9 and column H, the happy circles in the right center box and fifth row, and so on and so on.

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