Now, when you look at a Flower puzzle, it may not be obvious straight away that there are 5 sub puzzles. First of all, there is a center puzzle, a standard 9×9 sudoku. Then, there are 4 additional puzzles, one to the left, one to the right, one to the top and one to the bottom. Each of them overlaps with the center puzzle over 6 rows or columns. Interestingly enough, the center puzzle is completely covered by the other 4.

How to solve Flower Sudoku? Well, you use the usual Sudoku solving techniques, naked singles, hidden singles, subsets (pairs, triplets, quads) and the row/column and nonet interactions. But there is an additional solving technique that only applies to overlapping puzzles and only to some of them. It surely applies to Flower Sudoku puzzles and the one I’m posting here is a good example for you to practice. This “new solving technique” is called Twin Nonets.

If you need more explanation of Twin Nonets, please post your comment and I will do my best to explain it again.

Flower Sudoku - Twin Nonets - EASY

The solution is here.