About SudokuBank

In 2020, I (along with many others) was recommended The Miracle Sudoku by Cracking The Cryptic on YouTube. I immediately became hooked on the concepts surrounding variant Sudoku and the creativity of the community. Solving these puzzles became a daily routine for me, and it hasn't slowed down since. Almost every puzzle I have solved since 2020 has been on the fantastic web app SudokuPad.

Fast forward to mid-2023, when I first played around with puzzle setting. I started out on f-puzzles and created some not-so-great puzzles. However, the setting process was just as gratifying as the solving process for me, and it would chew up nearly all of my free time for the following year. (Of course, I eventually found the amazing SudokuMaker, which made my setting journey much better.)

Setting puzzles also meant uploading them. And the most popular repository of custom puzzles (Logic Masters Germany) was the go-to spot. I was a bit surprised that the primary website housing so many brilliant puzzles was so dated and not user-friendly. But it's what the community used!

Then in early 2024, I decided I wasn't happy with this three-website process: build the puzzle on SudokuMaker, export it to SudokuPad, upload it to Logic Masters. Each tool is fantastic in its own right, but I wanted a cohesive experience - a modern location where anyone can come to set puzzles, solve puzzles, discover puzzles, and more. So I started building SudokuBank.

Building SudokuBank was quite a humbling experience. After around a year and a half, I had put together a fairly complete website: puzzle discovery, uploading, comments, rankings, accounts, and more. But at the time, I had settled on not including a built-in setter or solver tool, instead just linking out to each puzzle. Essentially, SudokuBank had become a modernized LMG. I was planning to launch soon, but I got some feedback from someone in the community that this might not be enough to draw people to SudokuBank. And it was true - I hadn't really achieved what I initially set out to do, and that didn't sit right with me.

So I decided to postpone. I spent another full year building out the setter and the player, and doing so was the best decision I could have made. It's been incredibly fun, exciting, and exhausting, and I'm so proud of the result.

So now, SudokuBank is finally ready to be used by the community. User accounts, an incredibly fast setter, dozens and dozens of Sudoku variants, built-in rule generation, hundreds of achievements, daily streaks, replays, and more. And I genuinely am just getting started - my vision for SudokuBank will keep me busy for ages.

Have fun and enjoy!