A stunning achievement. Mike Mepham, who has compiled a 4 page puzzle supplement for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph, has included a debut HaniDoku puzzle. Visits to my www.hanidoku.com website have grown to 3 figures, from the usual 10 to 15.

Interesting to see how the feedback will be. This variant is so very promising.

I just calculated the POM space for the variant with interesting results. Only 244 templates exist, but with the optional digits, there can be upto 8 positions in a template that may or may not contain a digit. I cannot yet oversee the full implications of the optional digits on the templates. It could be that there are “incomplete” templates that cannot be expanded to one of the 244 full templates, but which are nevertheless valid for a digit with optional positions. In-depth testing must be done to gain some insight.