Thursday's puzzle is a 3.5 star Thermo Sudoku, which made me pretty nervous. Although I started puzzle solving with Sudoku puzzles -- and my second puzzle on this blog is a Thermo variant -- I haven't really touched Sudoku construction since then. Sudoku just isn't really my thing; I prefer puzzles with more "geometry" to them and, in particular, find scanning in Sudoku puzzles to be a bit of a pain. However, this "geometry" inclination does make Thermo sudoku one of the more interesting variants to me, so at least I got a bit of a break there. (I would not have been prepared to make a classic!)
This puzzle took a long time to get working -- long thermometers are surprisingly restrictive, and I found my grids to break in completely unexpected ways, which made me sad. That being said, although I needed a significant amount of help from f-puzzles near the end, I did manage to make the following work. Apologies for the two-cell thermometers along the sides of the grid; there wasn't much I could do there.
I wasn't aiming to make a 3.5 star puzzle this time, but any comments about difficulty would be appreciated regardless.
Fun one! I don't typically solve Sudoku so I can't compare it to the GMP ratings, but this one felt smooth and carefully constructed. Well done!
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