One rule borrowed from sudoku, five tools, and a strategy that never needs a guess.
A body has been found. Every suspect was somewhere on the floor plan when it happened, and the clues tell you where. Your job is to place each suspect on the exact square they occupied. One arrangement fits every clue, and finding it closes the case.
No two suspects may share a row or a column. This is the rule murder sudoku borrows from sudoku, and it is what makes the puzzle solvable. The moment you place someone, their entire row and column become impossible for everyone else — the game marks those squares with red crosses for you.
Furniture squares are occupied by objects, so nobody stands there. They also act as landmarks: many clues describe a suspect's position relative to a table or a fountain.
Every clue is a fact. There are no misleading statements and no probabilities. Clues come as adjacency (“Hugo stood right beside the table”), direction (“Nora was west of Percy” — north is up, west is left), room counts (“Exactly two people were in the Salon”), distance, and negatives (“Percy was not in the Kitchen”). Negative clues are as valuable as positive ones; they close doors.
Tap a clue to strike it through once you have used it, so your eye stops returning to it.
No one can be placed on that square; some clues describe positions relative to it.
Select a suspect in the strip, then tap a square. Tap the same square again to pick them back up.
Marks a square the selected suspect cannot occupy. This is the tool that wins puzzles — see the strategy below.
Writes a suspect's initial in the corner of a square as a “maybe”. Useful when two squares are still possible.
Clears everything you put on a square.
Places the selected suspect on their correct square. Free and unlimited on the website.
Beginners hunt for the square where someone must be. Strong solvers do the opposite: they mark the squares where a suspect cannot be, and let the last survivor reveal itself.
