Sudoku ball
What you get is a representation of a sphere covered with interlocking sudokus. You can only see part of the sphere at any one time, so you have to turn the sphere with the mouse. Sometimes some of the numbers will be upside down no matter how you rotate the sphere. Some of the grids are twisted a bit to make them fit on the sphere, which makes the rows and columns hard for the eye to follow. To put a number in a square, you have to left-click on a control panel to select the number, and then right-click on the square. How unnatural is that, a left-click followed by right-click? However, the left button drags the sphere, so I guess they decided to use the right button to drop the digits.
I don’t know about this. There’s nothing wrong with sudoku, no problem that needs to be fixed. It’s not like I’ve ever worked a sudoku and thought “This is too easy. I wish I had half a dozen interlocking sudokus wrapped around a sphere so I can’t see everything at the same time.. I’d also like to fight with an awkward user interface.”
There is something wrong with trying to improve things by making them more complicated. A large part of sudoku’s appeal is its simplicity, the fact that there are 9 digits, 9 rows, 9 columns, 9 blocks, arranged in a 9-by-9 grid with straight lines. Within that limited universe there are billions of possibilities. If a sudoku is too easy, I don’t want something that’s more complicated, I want something that’s more challenging. Like doing them in color, which is both simpler and more challenging.
I have to admit, though, if I had the physical object, something the size of a soccer ball, covered with colored squares in an interlocking sudoku pattern, I’d think it was pretty cool.