Not Evil Sudoku vs Toehold

A joyful sudoku-solving experience built natively for iPhone and iPad and optimized for a zen solving experience free from bloat and distraction. Designed to be easy to play and meet you where ever you are in your sudoku journey: a casual solver or a sudoku pro. Stuck on a puzzle? Shake your phone for hints and turn on move by move validation in settings to get immediate feedback on your solve. Tickle your brain as you learn new solving strategies and customize the app to your taste with themes and alternate app icons. Play a daily puzzle at a difficulty of your choice and see where you stack up with players across the globe. Or just turn off the stopwatch and relax. Key features: - Fully offline: no internet required - No ads or distractions - Real-time move validation to get immediate feedback - Shake for a hint on the next logical move - Leaderboards with assist tracking - Easy, Medium, and Hard difficulty levels - Light/Dark mode - Stopwatch and best time tracking - Notes: Keep track of candidates - Auto-clear Notes: removes candidate numbers automatically in row, column, and box when they become outdated - Speed demon: Lock numbers and place them in multiple tiles at once - Arithmophobia: Sudoku with letters instead of numbers - Daily streak tracking - Daily reminder notifications - Highlighter: tap a number to highlight all its instances on the board - Themes to customize the interface (some require Pro) - Alternate app icons (Pro) - Charts and statistics (Pro): track solve speed over time and puzzle count by difficulty Play the daily puzzle at your preferred difficulty for free without any limits on assists or game features. Upgrade to Pro with a one-time purchase to unlock unlimited games, detailed stats, more themes, and alternate app icons. Pro supports Family Sharing.

Every other sudoku app has a hint button. You get stuck, you tap it, it fills in a square, and you have learned nothing. Toehold does the opposite. A panel sits beside your board and keeps a live inventory of the techniques that are available right now — "Hidden single ×2 · Pointing pair ×1 · X-Wing ×1" — updating on every digit and every pencil mark. It tells you what to look for. It does not tell you where. Tap a technique and it shows you the cells that make it true, and one plain sentence explaining why: "The only spots for 6 in box 2 — r1c5 and r3c5 — share column 5, so 6 leaves r4c5 and r6c5." Placing the digit is then a separate, deliberate tap. The toehold is yours; the climb is still yours too. DIFFICULTY THAT MEANS SOMETHING • Most apps grade by counting clues, which tells you nothing about how hard a puzzle is • Toehold grades by the hardest technique a puzzle actually requires • Gentle needs only singles. Steady adds locked candidates. Tricky adds pairs and triples. Tough needs X-Wing, Swordfish, or Y-Wing • Every puzzle is checked before you see it: exactly one solution, and solvable by named logic from start to finish. You will never be asked to guess ELEVEN TECHNIQUES, ALL EXPLAINED Naked and hidden singles · pointing pairs · box/line reduction · naked and hidden pairs and triples · X-Wing · Y-Wing · Swordfish. Each one names itself when it appears, so you learn the vocabulary by meeting it on your own board. BUILT FOR THE GRID • Pencil marks in a fixed 3x3 lattice, so a digit is always in the same spot • Fill all candidates in one tap, or place them yourself • Every key shows how many of that digit are left • Full undo • Optional mistake checking, off by default ON iPAD The technique panel stays open beside the board in a real two-column layout — not a stretched phone screen. PRIVATE AND OFFLINE Puzzles are generated on your device. No accounts, no ads, no analytics, no tracking, no network access of any kind. Free. Toehold is for anyone who has finished a sudoku and still could not say how they did it.