I don't doubt that, and I don't doubt it's a good puzzle, especially if you're already familiar with the format.
But since this is my first introduction to this kind of puzzle, I need some anchor points at the beginning so I feel like I have something to work off of.
I'm not even asking for a whole row, just an easier set of known chars at the start of the round so I have a hint at which of the 39 constraints I should start with.
To be honest I'm not even saying this puzzle should change so much as I am looking for a different puzzle to dip my toes.
I don't have any interest in starting the puzzle if I don't feel like I can put a foot down somewhere. It's like trying your first Minesweeper game, making two random clicks, and getting two `7`s. Where do you go from there? Or learning Sudoku from the hardest difficulty level, without having built up a library of patterns from the easier difficulties.
I did complete and enjoy it, but I'm both very competent with regex like you, but also big into sudoku variants (as in the youtube channel cracking the cryptic! [1]) so this felt like it was designed for me to enjoy. Considering it took me about half an hour, I'd expect someone who isn't into these kinds of odd puzzles already to basically have exactly your reaction.
I don't watch regularly (and I would consider myself a sudoku dabbler) but I've seen some Cracking the Cryptic videos in the past and enjoyed them greatly.
Yeah I definitely get that. I've never done a puzzle of this type before, but I have done a hell of a lot of logic puzzles (thanks to the Simon Tatham collection among others) so I was able to figure out a good attack vector. I agree, it wasn't easy to find where to start nor where to make progress in the beginning. Lots of data to ingest.
But since this is my first introduction to this kind of puzzle, I need some anchor points at the beginning so I feel like I have something to work off of.
I'm not even asking for a whole row, just an easier set of known chars at the start of the round so I have a hint at which of the 39 constraints I should start with.
To be honest I'm not even saying this puzzle should change so much as I am looking for a different puzzle to dip my toes.
I don't have any interest in starting the puzzle if I don't feel like I can put a foot down somewhere. It's like trying your first Minesweeper game, making two random clicks, and getting two `7`s. Where do you go from there? Or learning Sudoku from the hardest difficulty level, without having built up a library of patterns from the easier difficulties.