Missing Deck Puzzles is the joint effort of two long-time friends, FullDeck and Missing a Few Cards. FullDeck only recently started playing with a complete pack of cards, while Missing a Few Cards used to play with a full deck but is now dealing from a reduced pack. Both have been eager consumers of puzzles of all types since childhood and now enjoy solving and setting sudoku puzzles together.
We are assuming you know the basic rules of sudoku. If you don't, watch a video or two on one of many excellent Sudoku solving channels and we hope you'll be hooked as quickly as we were! Some of our favorites include BremSter Puzzles for more approachable puzzles (usually!), Cracking the Cryptic (CTC) for harder puzzles (and cryptic crosswords!), and Zetamath Solves Puzzles for a weekly livestream.
In the complete archive, you will find most of the puzzles we have set, with newer puzzles at the top. The archive is organized into categories and is searchable by puzzle name, constraint, difficulty, or other key words that appear in the puzzle description. Every puzzle has a unique solution that can be reached logically from the starting clues without any guessing. Each has a link so that you can try solving it in the SudokuPad App created by Sven Neumann.
In constructing a new puzzle, we always start with an idea of what we're trying to achieve and a target difficulty level. We brainstorm starting points, follow the logic of that starting point as far as we can, check for solutions, and continue refining constraints and clues until we are happy with the appearance of the puzzle. Then we test it ourselves to make sure the puzzle is uniquely solvable using only logical deductions. Depending on the difficulty level we want, we might add or remove clues. Once we are satisfied, it's time for testing by other sudoku fanatics who test-solve it and provide feedback about difficulty, elegance, and logic. For the mechanics of turning our starts into sets, we use Eric Fox's much appreciated sudoku setting app, f-puzzles together with additional constraint scripts by rangsk, or we use Sirxemic's Sudokumaker app. We then export it to Sven Neumann's SudokuPad app with the solution embedded for checking at the end.
Once a puzzle has been sufficiently tested, we may post it to the CTC Discord server, to LogicMasters Deutschland (LMD), or both. We may also create an easier version (see our description of Brassica puzzles) to distribute to friends and post here. In keeping with the Hardy-Littlewood Axioms of Collaboration, all of our puzzles are listed as being by FullDeck and Missing a Few Cards, or occasionally as Missing-Deck, regardless of who took the lead on setting the puzzle.