The Dojo: Sudoku Technique Drills in Sudoku Royale

The Dojo is the technique trainer inside Sudoku Royale. It has a lesson and a drill for 13 solving techniques, from Full House to XY-Wing. A drill skips the rest of the puzzle and shows you one board after another where a single technique is the next move. You find the move, fill the square, and the next board appears. It is the fastest way we know to turn a technique you understand into one you spot without searching.

Why drill techniques at all?

In a normal puzzle, you might meet an X-Wing once every few hard games. That is not enough repetition to learn to see one. You end up knowing the rule and still missing the pattern on a live board. Chess players have the same problem with tactics, which is why they solve tactics puzzles in bulk. The Dojo does the same for sudoku: dozens of examples of one pattern in a few minutes.

The 13 drills

Drills are grouped in three sets in the app, in the order you would learn them.

Each technique has its own guide on this site: full house, naked single, hidden single, pointing and claiming, naked pair, hidden pair, naked triple, hidden triple, X-Wing, Swordfish, XY-Wing, and simple coloring.

How a drill works

• A full board, one target. Every rep is a real 9x9 grid with the target square highlighted. You enter the digit that goes there.
• Elimination drills end in a placement. For pointing, pairs, and the advanced patterns, the technique frees a square. You apply the pattern in your head, then fill the freed square.
• Notes where the pattern needs them. Singles drills show a clean board, because you find singles by eye. From Pointing upward, the pencil marks are filled in, because those patterns live in the candidates.
• Real positions for the hard ones. The advanced drills are taken from real graded puzzles, at the exact moment the technique is the next step. You are practicing on the positions you will actually meet.

Streak Rush: how you are scored

Drills run as a Streak Rush. The clock counts up and the boards keep coming. A wrong answer resets your streak. Your record is the fastest time you have taken to get N correct in a row, where N depends on the technique (15 for singles, 10 for pairs and triples, 5 for the advanced patterns).

Each drill shows where your best time sits against every other player's best, in four bands: Beginner, Learning, Solid, and Expert. It is a clear target: get Hidden Single to Solid, then move on.

"Show me how": help without leaving the drill

If a board stumps you, tap "Show me how". The clock pauses and the app walks through the pattern step by step: where to look, what the pattern is, why it holds, and what it eliminates. If you have it reveal the answer, that rep does not count and your streak starts again, so the record always means you found them yourself.

Lessons

Every technique has a lesson you can open from the Dojo, or from a hint in Practice. A lesson gives the idea in one line, explains why the move is forced, adds a tip for what to scan for, and steps through an annotated board with the key cells highlighted and the eliminated candidates struck out. Read it once, then drill.

Sensei Royale picks what to drill

If you do not know which technique to work on, the Dojo's coach does. Sensei Royale looks at your recent games, finds the technique that cost you the most seconds, and gives you one assignment for it: learn it, spot it, or sharpen it. Finishing an assignment earns shuriken for the weekly Belt League. Read more in how Sensei Royale works.

Your skill profile

The Dojo's Stats view maps your play on five axes. Speed is how fast you execute once you have spotted a move. Accuracy is filling cells without guessing. Repertoire is how many techniques you can reach for. Vision is playing a move when it is there. Consistency is how regularly you have played over the last two weeks. Drills move Speed and Repertoire directly, and the others follow.

A simple training plan

1. Start with Hidden Single. It is the technique that solves the most cells, and it makes everything else faster.
2. Run each Filling drill until you reach Solid, then do the same for Pointing and Claiming.
3. Add the pairs once your medium puzzles stall after the singles run out.
4. Take the advanced drills when you start playing Hard and Expert puzzles in Practice.
5. Keep one or two short drill sessions a week to hold your times.

For the reading side of the same path, see our list of sudoku techniques and how to solve sudoku faster.