Thomas Snyder (aka Dr. Sudoku) is a two-time World Sudoku Champion and five-time US Puzzle Champion, as well as the author of several books of puzzles. His puzzles are hand-crafted, with artistic themes, serving as a kind of “cure for the common sudoku.” Each week he posts a new puzzle on his blog, The Art of Puzzles. This week’s prescription consists of two Digit Battleships puzzles written for the Indian Puzzle Championship.

The approach of summer marks the start of the national puzzle championship season. Father’s Day weekend has traditionally been the home of the United States Puzzle Championship but it looks like that qualifier will be held in mid-August this year. Still, over the next several weeks I’ll be offering up examples of puzzles commonly seen on the USPC as practice for potential competitors. The two puzzles this week (an easy, and a medium) are Digit Battleships puzzles that were originally written for the Indian Puzzle Championship. While these are variants of the classic Battleships type, the first puzzle of the USPC is almost always a Battleships so getting used to placing ships in a grid is how I’ll start out these practice puzzles.

Rules: Locate the indicated fleet in the grid; each segment of a ship occupies a single cell and ships are oriented vertically or horizontally. Ships may not touch each other, even diagonally. Each segment of each ship is labeled with a number as in the fleet diagram, and the numbers on the right/bottom of the grid indicate the sum of all the numbers present in that row/column.

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