Murder Sudoku: A Whodunnit You Solve Like a Logic Grid
Murder Sudoku is what happens when a detective story and a placement puzzle are built as the same object. You are given a scene, a cast, a victim and a numbered list of clues, and you solve it the way you would solve a logic grid: not by intuition about who looks guilty, but by elimination until only one arrangement survives.
There is no bank of hand written cases behind it. Every case is generated fresh, verified to have exactly one solution, and then wrapped in its own story.
How it works
The board is a 5x5 grid of rooms. There are four suspects and one victim.
The placement rule is the Sudoku part: at most one person sits in each row and each column. Five people, five rows, five columns, so it is a permutation, and any clue that pins one person restricts every other.
Then the clues. Each suspect's clue constrains where they can be, and you have to satisfy all of them.
The solution is the arrangement where everything holds. And then the payoff:
The killer is whoever ends up sharing the victim's room.
That last line is what makes it a story rather than an abstract exercise. You do not deduce the murderer directly. You deduce the whole floor plan, and the murderer falls out of it.
The clue families
Clues come in several shapes, and learning to read them is most of the skill:
- Direct facts. A suspect is or is not in a named room. The easiest foothold, and where you
should always start.
- Relative position. One person is in the same row or column as another, or is not.
- Compass clues. A suspect sits in a particular direction relative to a room or another person.
Read these carefully: the convention is fixed and stated in the rules screen, and getting the orientation backwards will produce a consistent but wrong grid.
- Negative facts. Nobody is in a given room, or a suspect is not adjacent to something.
At the harder tiers, direct facts thin out and the indirect ones carry more of the load.
Five tiers
Beginner, Easy, Medium, Hard and Evil, the same tier pattern as Sudoku, Killer Sudoku and Logikwis. The tier changes the clue mix rather than the board: harder cases give you fewer direct facts and more clues that only become useful once something else is settled.
Every case is unique, and verified
The generator builds a case, then confirms with a solver that it has exactly one valid arrangement, before writing the briefing.
That matters more here than in most puzzles, because an ambiguous whodunnit is not a puzzle with two answers, it is a story with no ending. If two arrangements were both consistent, two different people would both be the murderer.
Because cases are generated rather than shipped, the supply is unlimited.
The board and the tools
The board is illustrated: suspect portrait tokens, drawn furniture, room names printed on the grid. It is a floor plan you are reading, not a table.
Alongside placing and erasing, you get a notes and cross out deduction layer, which is the tool you actually solve with. Cross out what a clue rules out, and the surviving cells are the answer. Hints are available and cost you on the score.
Every suspect, room and object name is original. There are no borrowed characters and no borrowed mansion.
Scoring
Solve time plus a penalty for each mistake and each hint. Lowest total wins, like every puzzle in Braggster.
And, as everywhere else in the app's puzzles, there is no live wrong entry feedback. Place someone in the wrong room and nothing flashes at you. Mistakes are counted silently and revealed in the solve summary. A deduction puzzle that tells you when you are wrong is doing the deduction for you.
The name
The game was originally called Murdoku. It ships as Murder Sudoku because there is an active trademark on the shorter name. The descriptive name carries no trademark disclaimer, which is the same reason Killer Sudoku is fine to use.
Frequently asked questions
How big is the board? 5x5 rooms, with four suspects and one victim.
How do I find the killer? Solve the placement first. The killer is whichever suspect ends up in the same room as the victim.
Can two suspects be in the same row? No. At most one person occupies each row and each column, which makes the arrangement a permutation.
Do the cases repeat? No. Each case is generated on demand and verified to have exactly one solution, so the supply is unlimited.
What languages is it available in? Dutch and English. The story text is written per language rather than machine translated, which is why it ships in fewer languages than the number grid puzzles.
Is it related to any existing board game? No. Every suspect, room and object name is original to the game.
More: see all thirteen logic puzzles, read about Sudoku difficulty, or browse the catalogue at braggster.com/games.