Naked Triplet Practice Puzzles

Every puzzle below is verified to feature the Naked Triplet as its hardest required technique — of the 65,284 puzzles in our library, 25,347 require it and 4,795 need nothing harder. New to the pattern? Learn the Naked Triplet or see a worked example first.

How to drill the Naked Triplet

The Naked Triplet is where most solvers first meet a pattern that does not look the way the definition sounds. Three cells in a unit share three candidates between them — but no cell has to show all three. Two-candidate cells like 12, 23 and 13 form a perfectly valid triplet, and so do 12, 123 and 23.

That is the entire difficulty, and it is what these puzzles train. If you only ever spot triplets where all three cells show all three digits, you will find perhaps a third of them. The reliable method is to work from the union: find two or three cells in a unit whose candidates, taken together, come to exactly three distinct digits.

Once found, the eliminations are the same as a pair's — strike those three digits from every other cell in the shared unit — and, as with pairs, the placement you are after usually appears a step later rather than immediately.

Curated Naked Triplet puzzles

  1. Practice puzzle #1 — 24 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Triplet
  2. Practice puzzle #2 — 24 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Triplet
  3. Practice puzzle #3 — 24 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Triplet
  4. Practice puzzle #4 — 25 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Triplet
  5. Practice puzzle #5 — 23 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Triplet
  6. Practice puzzle #6 — 26 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Triplet
  7. Practice puzzle #7 — 24 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Triplet
  8. Practice puzzle #8 — 23 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Triplet
  9. Practice puzzle #9 — 27 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Triplet
  10. Practice puzzle #10 — 25 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Triplet
  11. Practice puzzle #11 — 25 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Triplet
  12. Practice puzzle #12 — 25 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Triplet
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Naked Triplet practice FAQ

How many Sudoku puzzles require the Naked Triplet technique?
Of the 65,284 puzzles in the Precision Sudoku library, 25,347 require the Naked Triplet to solve, and 4,795 can be completed with nothing harder than the Naked Triplet. Every puzzle is verified by a solver that records the exact techniques needed.
Do all three cells need to contain all three candidates?
No, and assuming so is the most common reason triplets get missed. What matters is that the union of the three cells' candidates contains exactly three digits. Cells showing 12, 23 and 13 form a valid Naked Triplet even though no cell shows all three.
How do I find triplets without checking every combination?
Scan a unit for cells with two or three candidates only, then look for a set of three whose combined candidates total three distinct digits. Cells with four or more candidates can never be part of a Naked Triplet, so they can be ignored immediately.