Daily Sudoku Garden guide: daily difficulty, stars, hints, and the flower

Daily Sudoku Garden is a standard 9x9 sudoku with a daily twist: everyone in the world gets the same puzzle on the same day, and solving it grows a flower in a personal garden. There is also a practice mode with freely chosen difficulty.

The single most important thing to understand before you start is that this game has no failure state. There is no countdown, no move limit, and no way to lose. The clock counts up and is never compared against anything. Your only currency is stars, and stars come down to two numbers.

Daily Sudoku GardenSolve the same daily sudoku as everyone else, then plant that day's flower in a garden the world shares.Play free in your browser →

What counts as a mistake

A mistake is any digit you place that is not the correct answer for that square. It is:

• marked in red on the grid immediately, so you can see and fix it,
• added to the mistake counter shown next to the grid,
• permanent. Undo and erase both roll back the grid, but the counter does not go down.

That is the whole risk model. There is no punishment beyond the number going up.

Stars: what actually costs you

The scoring is precise and worth memorising:

• 3 stars — zero mistakes and zero hints.
• 2 stars — mistakes plus hints, added together, is 3 or fewer.
• 1 star — anything else.

Notice what is missing from that formula: pencil notes are not counted at all. Neither is your time, and neither is how many puzzles you have solved before. So the star-optimal strategy is not to be fast. It is to write down every candidate you are unsure about, and to use the hint button as sparingly as you possibly can.

This is the single most useful thing to know about the game, and it inverts the instinct most people arrive with. Writing notes heavily costs you nothing score-wise, and the game actively helps you: when you place a correct digit, it automatically erases that digit from the pencil notes in all 20 squares that share a row, column, or box with it. So placing confirmed values is the fastest way to keep your notes clean.

Daily difficulty follows the weekday

The daily puzzle is not adaptively tuned. The day of the week picks the difficulty directly:

• Sunday — Expert
• Monday, Tuesday — Easy
• Wednesday, Thursday — Medium
• Friday, Saturday — Hard

The difficulty setting controls how many clues the puzzle starts with, and how hard it is to reason about:

So Monday's puzzle leaves 41 squares for you and Sunday's leaves 56. If you want a lighter day than the calendar is offering, use practice mode instead — it generates a fresh puzzle at whichever of the four levels you pick, with no relation to the date.

How to actually enter digits

• Tap a square, then tap a digit on the pad below the grid. Or use the number keys 1 to 9.
• Tap the same digit again in a square that already holds it, and it clears.
• Arrow keys move the selection once you have selected a square.
• The digit pad shows a remaining count for each number, counting only squares you have filled correctly. When a number is fully and correctly placed, it shows a tick.
• Notes toggles pencil-mark mode. In notes mode, tapping a digit adds or removes a pencil mark without placing a real digit. Press n to toggle it.
• Erase clears a square completely, value and notes alike. Backspace, Delete, and 0 do the same.

The highlight colours help: selecting a square marks its 20 peers, and marks every other square holding the same digit, so you can check a whole unit at a glance.

The Hint button is worth understanding before you use it

Hints are a star cost, so it helps to know what one actually does.

If you have a square selected, and that square is not a given and does not currently hold the correct answer, the hint fills in that square. So if you want control over what gets revealed, select it first.

If nothing suitable is selected, the hint instead fills the most constrained empty square — the one with the fewest unfilled peers. That is usually the square with the most information pointed at it, so it tends to resolve a cell you would have cracked yourself shortly.

Either way, the hint reveals a digit for you and increments your hint counter. If a hint fills the final square, the puzzle ends right there.

The daily flower

Solve the day's puzzle and a flower opens. The interesting part is who gets to name it.

When the first player in the world solves that day's puzzle, the game asks an AI to invent a flower for that date — a name and a short piece of flower language, influenced by the season and the date. That flower is then registered globally. Everyone who solves the same day's puzzle afterwards receives that same flower and is shown as one of the day's solvers.

There is also a separate AI moment that fires after every solve, daily or practice. It writes a single line reacting to how you actually solved: your time, your mistakes, your hint count, how many pencil notes you wrote, and which digit you placed last. It is a small remark on your run, not a grade.

Two practical consequences: solving early in the day is what makes you the first bloomer, and your streak — consecutive days solved — is tracked from your garden. The streak tolerates one missed day: if you have not solved today yet, yesterday still counts, so you have until the end of today to keep it alive.

Practical tips

• Use notes without guilt. They are free, and correct placements clean them up for you.
• Commit only to squares you are certain about. A single guess at 5 stars drops you to 1 star, because five mistakes puts you over the 2-star threshold immediately.
• Select the square before pressing Hint if you want a specific cell filled rather than the most constrained one.
• Lean on the number pad. If a digit still has a remaining count, it is not fully placed, which is a fast progress check that costs no stars.
• Take Sunday seriously. Expert at 25 clues is a different exercise from easy at 40. If Sunday is not the day for it, practice mode has the same difficulty available on demand.
• The timer is not a target. Because it never runs backwards and never ends the game, treating it as pressure only makes you guess faster.

If you only remember three things

1. Nothing can make you lose, so mistakes and hints are the only real costs.
2. Pencil notes are free and auto-cleaned, so use them heavily.
3. Daily difficulty is just the weekday — expert on Sunday, easy on Monday, and practice mode is always available.