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Bridge Sudoku

Penpa Link (v1)

Penpa Link (v2: added an area to record players' hands)

Penpa Link (v3: using swaroopg92's Penpa+)

rules

Normal Sudoku rules applied.
Each cage is the record of n-th trick in a contract bridge game, where n is the number in the top left corner of the cage.
- 10, J, Q, K, A are recorded as 10, J, Q, K, A, but are treated as 12345 respectively when considering Sudoku rules. 2~9 are recorded as 2~9.
- For some cards, the suit of that card is given in the top right corner.
- Each cage contains the card played by West, North, East and South, from left to right or top to bottom.
- Dotted circles indicates the lead / first player of each trick.
- The up arrows indicate the cell must contain a J, Q, K, or A.
- The game result is recorded as 3NT/W +2, that is,
  - No trump suits.
  - West and East won 11 of the 13 tricks in total.
  - North led the first trick.
If you are unfamiliar with contract bridge, here are rules that each trick must follow (in this particular game):
- The lead player can play any card from their hand.
- Other players must follow the suit of the leading card if they can.
  - For example, if lead player played a ♦️ in this trick, and West has ♦️2, ♦️5 and ♠️3 in their hand. Then West must play either ♦️2 or ♦️5, but not ♠️3.
  - Otherwise, if a player doesn't have any card of the same suit, they can play any card from their hand.
- The winner of a trick is determined by "the card with the highest rank and has the same suit as the leading card".
  - The ranking is 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, J, Q, K, A (low to high).
  - For example, if a trick has the following card: ♠️5, ♠️3, ♠️2, ♥️K, and North (or ♠️3) leads the trick. Then West (or ♠️5) wins the trick. (♥️K doesn't matter, because it is not a ♠️)
- The winner of the current trick leads the next trick.

More about contract bridge

3NT/W +2 means:
- W ==> west and east player
- 3NT ==> For west and east player to win the game, they have to win 9 of the 13 tricks or more. And there is no trump in this game.
- +2 ==> The west and east player end up winning 11 of the 13 tricks and wins the game.

a small example

Since the 4x4 grid cannot record entire game (the entire game has 52 cards played), this grid only records the last 2 tricks of a game.

No trump (same as the puzzle)
The starting hand is shown in the right boxes, where digit "1"s represent 10, digit "2", "3", "4" represent 2, 3, 4.

SOlving the small example

Since the first card played in 12th trick is a spade, and there is a 3 of spade in West's hand, they must play this card in 12th trick, instead of 2 of hearts. Therefore, we can put 3 in r1c1.
Since 13th trick is led by West, West must win 12th trick. This means East played 2 of spades in 12th trick. We can put 2 in r1c3.
- North player cannot win 12th trick because they can only play 10 of hearts or 3 of diamonds, neither of them are spades.
In 13th trick, there is only one card in each player's hand, so we can put 2 and 4 in row 4. They are the only cards West and East can play.
We cannot put another 4 in row 4, so South must play 4 of diamonds in 12th trick, and 10 of diamonds in 13th trick.
For the same reason, North played 10 of hearts in 12th trick, and 3 of diamonds in 13th trick.
The remaining digits can be solved by normal Sudoku rules.
Though it doesn't matter for this small example, West won 13th trick.
- Because the first card played is 2 of hearts, and no other players played a card of hearts, 2 of hearts won.

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