This post details the solving of the Antoine Alary review puzzle More Extreme 104, featuring a laborious line marking leading to a sea of candidates. Then the day is saved by Antoine’s escape hatch, maintaining a reasonably advanced level of the collection.

The bypass has some success, but Whew! The 2-D trace of line marking doesn’t remotely do justice to the effort involved.

So if you passed up the homework assignment, here is what you avoided:

But even here, the efficiencies of Sysudoku line marking make it much less work than traditional number scanning. If you aren’t convinced, here are some line marking pointers: Go back through it, and this time, form the next long line string from the previous one, by deleting the new clue numbers, and typing back in the old ones. On really long strings (6f, 7f!, 8f!!), after copying the line string, delete the numbers seen from the cell before inserting the copy into the cell.

Oh, you’re doing this by hand? You’re not using my ©PowerPoint template? No wonder you’re thinking of tossing Alary’s book into the round file. Don’t do it, Pilgrim! Look at the Tools page. Send the email. Get the template file, it’s free. You can thank me later.

Yes, its horrible. But there’s the upside. It’s easy to dismiss the possibilities of Sue de Coq, APE, or UR rectangles. From line marking I remember marking more slinks for 6 than any other number, so I try fill in the 6-panel first, and notice an almost nice loop.

Marking from the NE6 clue, a slow collapse includes two naked triples.

The collapse continues without hesitation, undeterred by the large number of candidates in many cells.

My impression is, that if this doesn’t happen in an Alary stingy, you have probably missed the advanced technique eliminations that Antoine built the puzzle around.

OK, are you willing to stand up to another Alary stingy pants? This one, More Extreme 84, gets into some really extreme stuff, but basic solving is merely challenging. With the free template and your sysudokie technique, it’s a snap.