Your Sudoku puzzle should be a challenge, but it shouldn’t be impossible for you to solve.

Sudoku puzzles come in different levels of difficulty. If you ‘re a beginner, don’t start with the super-fiendish level. Try the super-easy levels first, or maybe even a 4 x 4 mini-sudoku.

Once that level is easy for you, then move on to the next most difficult level.

1) use a pencil

2) Don’t do any marking up until you’ve solved all of the cells that you can, using cross-hatching

3) Then start to use cross hatching to mark up instances when there are two or three cells in a region where a specific number might go.

The more difficult Sudoku puzzles can’t be solved just by using the scanning techniques of crosshatching and counting. In these more complicated puzzles, scanning will still leave you with cells where you don’t know which of two or more numbers to choose.