Medium Sudoku Puzzles

A puzzle is rated Medium here when its hardest required technique is Naked Pair, Omission, Naked Triplet or Hidden Pair — verified by a solver, not guessed from a star rating. 19,657 of the 65,284 puzzles in our library are rated Medium. How our difficulty ratings work.

Medium puzzles are where pencil marks start to matter. Singles will stall partway through, and you will need candidate eliminations — a Naked Pair, an Omission, a Naked Triplet, or a Hidden Pair — to break the position open before singles finish the grid.

Medium is the tier where solvers first meet a position that singles cannot break, and it is where most people either learn candidate notation or quietly give up on Sudoku. Both outcomes are common enough that this tier deserves more patience than its label suggests.

The move that unlocks nearly everything here is Omission — the box-line interaction — which is cheap to check and constantly available. Reach for it before pairs and triples. Playing online helps at this tier specifically because the interface maintains candidates for you, so the effort goes into spotting the pattern rather than into bookkeeping.

A useful habit at this tier is to notice which technique broke each puzzle open. If the answer is almost always Omission, the next thing worth learning is the Naked Pair; if you are already reaching for pairs comfortably, Hard is closer than it looks. Tracking that is more informative than tracking your time, because it tells you what to learn rather than how fast you did what you already know.

Play medium puzzles

  1. Medium puzzle #1 — 26 givens · needs Naked Single, Hidden Single, Naked Pair
  2. Medium puzzle #2 — 24 givens · needs Naked Single, Hidden Single, Omission
  3. Medium puzzle #3 — 24 givens · needs Naked Single, Omission, Naked Triplet
  4. Medium puzzle #4 — 24 givens · needs Naked Single, Hidden Single, Naked Pair, Omission, Naked Triplet, Hidden Pair
  5. Medium puzzle #5 — 26 givens · needs Naked Single, Hidden Single, Naked Pair
  6. Medium puzzle #6 — 24 givens · needs Naked Single, Hidden Single, Omission
  7. Medium puzzle #7 — 24 givens · needs Naked Single, Hidden Single, Naked Pair, Omission, Naked Triplet
  8. Medium puzzle #8 — 25 givens · needs Naked Single, Hidden Single, Hidden Pair
  9. Medium puzzle #9 — 24 givens · needs Naked Single, Hidden Single, Naked Pair
  10. Medium puzzle #10 — 24 givens · needs Naked Single, Hidden Single, Omission
  11. Medium puzzle #11 — 26 givens · needs Naked Single, Omission, Naked Triplet
  12. Medium puzzle #12 — 25 givens · needs Naked Single, Hidden Single, Naked Triplet, Hidden Pair
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Medium Sudoku FAQ

What makes a Sudoku puzzle medium?
On Precision Sudoku, difficulty is defined by the hardest technique a puzzle actually requires, verified by a solver — not by a vague star rating. A puzzle is rated Medium when the hardest move it needs is Naked Pair, Omission, Naked Triplet, Hidden Pair.
How many medium Sudoku puzzles are there on Precision Sudoku?
19,657 of the 65,284 verified puzzles in the Precision Sudoku library are rated Medium, meaning their hardest required technique is Naked Pair, Omission, Naked Triplet, Hidden Pair.
What single technique unlocks the most Medium puzzles?
Omission, also called pointing and claiming. If a digit's only homes inside a box lie on one line, it can be removed from that line elsewhere, and vice versa. It costs seconds to check, fires constantly at this tier, and is the technique most often skipped by solvers who jump straight to subsets.
Why do singles suddenly stop working here?
Because these puzzles are constructed so that the chain of forced placements runs out partway. Progress then depends on proving where a digit cannot go, which prunes a unit until a placement reappears. The reasoning shifts from finding answers to removing possibilities.