Last updated on December 15th, 2025 at 04:24 am
Sumaddle – Board Game Review
Sumaddle is a Board/Puzzle/Education game from Jonathan Buchanan, first launched in 14th February 2021.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 757+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Sumaddle Stand Out
• “Brilliant puzzle game”, UK App Store review Apr 2025
• “Best Puzzle Game I’ve Ever Played”, US App Store review Jan 2025
• “The ONLY iOS game I've never gotten tired of”, Reddit review Apr 2024
This type of logical puzzle was first seen in the Japan Puzzle Championship 2006 and is sometimes known as Doppelblock, or Smashed Sums. When played with pencil and paper, these puzzles can be hard work to solve. Sumaddle changes that by adding the essential element of interaction. This transforms the puzzles into intriguing brain teasers that unfold before your eyes.
Each puzzle has a unique solution. Finding the solution involves fitting the number combinations to the clues. The app makes it easy to view the possible combinations, you don’t need to do any sums in your head. Instead, you can focus on using logic to narrow down the combinations and find a fitting arrangement.
Some reasons why you will enjoy playing Sumaddle:
• puzzles range in size and difficulty from small and simple to large and mind-blowing
• more than 120 puzzles are included for free
• all puzzles can be solved with pure logic, no mental arithmetic required
• the sophisticated built-in help can explain the logical reasoning at each step and also fix mistakes if you go wrong
• the built-in help is completely free, use it as much as you like
• works offline (great for long journeys)
• a high standard of accessibility, including comprehensive support for VoiceOver
• ad-free play – there are absolutely no ads!
This Board game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Sumaddle is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 24th November 2025
Recent improvements include:
New multi-select capabilities, together with some small corrections and fixes. The changes in detail:
• When multiple squares are selected by swiping (sliding) along a row or column, all squares that are not blocks are now selected together. Previously, multiple squares could only be selected together if they were all either inside or outside the blocks.
• New settings for multi-select make it possible to adjust the current selection. Squares can be added to the selection, or removed from the selection, or the whole selection can be inverted. The new settings can be found on the settings page for optional features.
• Pre-filled blocks in 9×9 puzzles are a little darker in all display modes.
• Fix for an issue where the timer for a puzzle would not always start correctly.
• Fixes for propagation issues when the candidate values of squares are changed.
• The sliders used for setting the volume level and red-filter effect now snap to the step positions correctly.
• Further attempts to prevent the Game Center access point from appearing on pages where it shouldn’t. This was sometimes happening when returning to the app after it had been inactive for an extended period.
• Version 2.1.1 also includes fixes for two regression issues: (1) the timer would sometimes keep running when a puzzle was paused; (2) when the setting to show inverted combinations is enabled and a clue value is tapped a second time, the combinations were only being shown inverted if 2 blocks were present.
The new multi-select capabilities may be particularly useful for when a row or column has n squares with exactly n candidate values. For example, if there are two squares which can only take the values 1 or 2, these two candidate values can be eliminated from all other squares in the same row or column. By selecting all the other squares together, the values can be removed from all squares at once.
Download & Availability
Sumaddle is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
Love this puzzle type, requires brainpower. Interface gives you all the tools you could hope for while solving. Top it off with unlimited randomly generated puzzles and its a winner.
The game itself is fun! It could be a nice challenge and a great brain teaser, if it didnt give you all the answers. When you click a box to fill it, it shows all the number options you can choose inside that box. The issue is when you have already used that number in the row or column, it takes that number out the box and only shows available numbers. After you solve a few numbers, it pretty much has the puzzle solved for you. We dont want a hint unless we have trouble solving the puzzle but you get one with every box. There is no way to turn this off. We messaged support to ask if we were just missing a setting and they confirmed it cant be turned off. Because you can use as many hints as you need, this function just feels kind of in the way and for no reason. With the 5×5 puzzles when you figure out 1 or 2 boxes, the game gives you the rest of the answers. There is still a good challenge to the 7×7 ones if you can ignore the hints! Im kind of forcing ourselves to ignore the hints but then our adhd kicks in and we cant help but notice, and it just kind of is annoying. If it werent for that this would probably be our favorite number puzzle game! We considered paying for the extra puzzles when we finish the free ones but we just cant pay for it to just give us the answers. If this doesnt bother you then you will find this game fun for sure.
We play this game obsessively! Its somewhat difficult to learn at first, but once you understand how to solve the puzzles, its addicting. You can toggle the size and difficulty of the random puzzles, or you can try their packs for a few bucksive gotten every single one. Plus, its available offline, so its a perfect airplane game. One of our all time favorites.
We really enjoy puzzle games. Very few games force us to think outside the box though. That is, until we stumbled upon this gem. We honestly dont think theres a single flaw in this game. Its such a simple idea, that was executed so incredibly well. Easy to learn, hard to master. We like to believe Im pretty good at this game, and routinely play higher difficulty levels. However, unlike most games, this one always manages to stump us again and again. We highly recommend anyone who enjoys the free puzzles to purchase the puzzle generator. Its super customizable, to make it as easy or as hard as you want and youll never run out of puzzles to solve. Shame on you developer for making such an addicting game!! Jokes aside, we wish we had more masterpieces like this.
So we enjoy this game a lot, the concept is fun and its a good mental workout, the app works well, no obnoxious ads which is rare these days, and we have purchased several puzzle packs and have fun going through them! We have 4 sets of the scary level puzzles, and one feature we wish this app had would be the ability to go back and clear/reset only certain puzzle sets or individual puzzles. Sometimes we solve a few puzzles using hints, and we wish we could see which ones weve solved with hints and have the option to clear those and try again, without having to use the reset all button. Ive played through the first pack of the scary level puzzles WAY too often because we wanted to play through some of our purchased packs again. Im sure other people out there want to play their purchased puzzles more than once without having to clear and replay the sample puzzles again. If you can add this feature so we can clear certain puzzles after completing them to try them again, Id rate 5 stars!!! Part of the fun is seeing if you can improve your scores/times, but having to clear all 4 sets of puzzles when there are maybe 6 we wanted to retry can be a hassle, since the game automatically tries to make us play them in order when using the next puzzle button.
We love puzzle games and frequently download ones we find to see how they are. Usually, we end up deleting the apps after about a week or two because they are really clunky or have an abundance of ad pop ups. Not only are these puzzles really fun and engaging, but the design of the app is top tier. It is probably the sleekest app we have on our phone/iPad. Easy interface and great hint system with explanations for the really difficult puzzles. Just a fantastic app all around.
Fun game without ads but you only get a certain number of puzzles before you hit a paywall and its $9.99 to continue. We mean, it makes sense if they arent making money through ads so they still get a good review. But we finished them all in one day fyi.
We play a lot of different types of puzzles and this one is the one we always come back to. We bought the puzzle generator and it was totally worth it. It we the perfect brain break.
Wish there were more levels in the challenge trail & the ability to turn off hints. All in all awesome game, thanks.
Our wife and we both play this, if we get a particularly hard random one we'd love to send it to her so she can play on her app. Is there a way to do that coming soon.
Good game! $25 for puzzle generator and all packs? For a number game? Get real. You can get any number of high quality console games with story, graphics, game design, etc for well under that price.
The playing experience is perfect, puzzles are varied and fun, and the balance between free and paid content, with NO ads, is wonderful. Highly recommend.
Completed challenge trail and all the free puzzles, bought the $9.99 endless puzzles immediately. Our fianc and we cant stop playing Let us know if you think Im missing out on anything by not doing the $.99 pack first Hope you can think of a new mechanic to add as a setting every few months to keep it fresh, even the 8x8s are starting to solve themselves (albeit slowly) Maybe non square grids, rows mark with a * that subtract instead of add, need 3 boxes etc. Just something small every couple of months to drip feed more content.
Ive played hundreds of logic puzzle varieties over the years and felt pretty good about our sense of logic. Man, this is a tough one, though! It forces us to think in new ways because of the different possibilities. In fact, we were half convinced the developer had increased the difficulty too quickly when we got stuck after just like 5-6 puzzles. After viewing their in-game tips, tho, we just realized there were some logical points Id been missing…we applied them and was able to figure things out further. Still a pretty tough challenge, thogreat way to exercise our aging brain!!! :D.
LOVE! We thoroughly enjoy this logic game! We cant say there is much to improve but would comment on 2 things: 1. We think it would be helpful to have the number buttons at the bottom of the screen (or an option to have it on the left or right) 2. We wish when you tap for a hint and then tap to show the answer, it would explain why that is the correct answer. There are some we couldnt get past, once shown the answer we still had no clue how we were supposed to come to that! Overall a very good game.
This game is an enjoyable challenge! It is an interesting twist on the usual forced logic games like pic-cross because it incorporates sums of integers between the required pair of blocks (cells without numbers) on each row/column. The logic is very achievable, and much less complex than advanced sudoku. The game aids are pretty good. The instructions are well demonstrated, and the UI is kept clean, especially during play. There are some whimsical thematic graphics that add visual interest without getting in the way. In fact, the only reason we didnt go with 5 stars is that the block/number/clear cell buttons really should be below the grid and always displayed during play. Currently, they are on a button bar at the top of the screen and can be dismissed. We cant come up with any reason they shouldnt always be visible during play, and the top location is both inconvenient to tap and forces the players hand to cover the grid even more than is usual for grid logic games. Fix those issues, and this is an instant 5-star winner.
We sometimes get stuck, but the hints have been great to teach us how to go about figuring things out. We feel like Ive improved over time.
The quality is very high and the playing experience is some of the best Ive seen on iOS. Congrats to the dev team.
Im updating the review to 5 stars as the developer reached out to us right away offering help. We checked everything, its now all good!!! Im so relieved. We have reset all our puzzles (a few hundred of them as we purchased a lot), so that we can solve them again without losing points we wasnt supposed to lose in the first place. Thank you!! Enjoying the game again :) OLD: we would have happily given this game a 5-star review, but they keep deducting points for something we didnt even do we do not use help or hints!!! If we make a mistake, let us find it ourselves; only deduct points if we actually clicked the ?! Button. Its ridiculously demotivating, especially if we click something by accident. We have purchased all the extra packages we like the concept of the game and how it makes us think. But come on, we did not use help if we didt use the ?! Button.
Fantastic game. Just the right level of challenging. Easy enough that its an enjoyable anxiety reliever without being mind numbingly boring, and challenging enough to be engaging without being frustrating and anxiety provoking. Great job! Thanks.
If you're tired of the same sudoko puzzles and need something a bit more challenging. If you like intuitive and helpful controls. If you enjoy getting feature updates. You'll love Sumaddle. Give it a try. Finish the basic pack. If you want more, the random generator is awesome!! There you can find the difficult 9×9 puzzles. Great app.
Enjoying this. We would have appreciated a few more beginner complementary puzzles to really get the mechanics down. We see on another review the developer says more free puzzles have been added and now 100 free puzzles. We only count 30 all together in the sneaky, tricky, and ?? Categories. (we do wish those words werent so close in definition.) However, At $.99 the packs are a good deal. We meant to buy sneaky but got clever, then meant to buy tricky and got cunning, or.. Something like that you see what we mean. Now we have plenty to learn from. Game is well worth.
Enjoyable, just challenging enough, no glitches, easy and thoughtful interface.
This is, hands down, THE best logic game on the App Store. Period. And it just keeps getting better! Every time we thought of something that could improve the playability of the game mechanics, such as making it so we can select all squares outside of the blocks on a row or column as well as inside, it was just an update away! Ive spent so much time playing the largest, hardest puzzles on random mode its to the point where Im now wishing for harder puzzles than we can get there! We understand 9×9 is hard to generate, but now we know its possible, so pleeease put more in puzzle packs!! Lots more! One thing we keep hoping to see is an option to highlight or color code the different number options like is usually possible in Sudoku apps. Doing the high grid values we can get overwhelmed by the visual input sometimes and we have often spent five full minutes staring at the screen before caving and using the help only to find that there was a row with only one 5 left or something stupid like that because we just couldnt visually parse all the tiny numbers. Being able to highlight all 5s would have let it take us 2 seconds. This is not a case of being unable to make the logical steps toward solving the puzzle, but simply of being unable to process visually what options are available, and it makes it a bit frustrating. Another thing Ive noticed is that, though there is always a logical next step, a lot of times when Im stumped on an 8×8 Very Difficult its much easier on our score to simply pick something where only two options are available and try one, then the other to see which one ends illogically five-to-twenty steps later. Takes a lot less time than just staring and MUCH fewer points than using the help, but Im left no wiser to the logical procedure that would have gotten us out of it. Feels like cheating, kind of, but using the help takes so many points that we would much rather spend thirty seconds going down a rabbit hole than get our score knocked down as if we spent an extra 24 minutes on the puzzle. Plus, if its literally just something simple we couldnt see because the puzzle got too busy-looking it really feels like flushing our score down the drain for nothing. We have a leaderboard to conquer!! Just yesterday, we discovered a new logic trick for our mental toolbox by finally caving and looking at the explanation. Ive been playing this game for a year, we thought there werent any left! But its another example of how much depth there really is to this game and that its a wonderful way to level up your logicking if youre like us and quite bored of Sudoku, Picture Cross and the like. The critiques that we do have are quite minor and only even become noticeable once youre doing puzzles of the very highest difficulty. We couldnt recommend this game more highly, especially in comparison with pretty much every single other game that first shows up as soon as you search for a puzzle game. And we have! To everyone we know! But it seems every time someone is really interested, turns out they have an Android! Any ETA on when this will be available for Android devices? Edit: Less than a month later, both of our concerns about functionality have been addressed!! They are offering 9×9 in random play now, which we had assumed couldnt even be done, AND theres a new highlight function!!! They got around having ridiculously long generation times by allowing there to be one or two blocks already placed at the start of the game, which we thought genius. Im so incredibly impressed and pleased with these developers and the time and care they put into making this game the most playable, glitch-free and fun logic game out there, we cant tell you. Now all we need is to be able to share it with our friends that use Android.
We would love it if we could start a game/challenge trail on one device and pick it up on another. Normally Game Center games work like this. Is this a bug or a feature not yet available? Love this game.
We dont normally leave reviews, but Im so impressed with this app that we had to in this case! Not only is the interface nicely intuitive, the help is also incredibly helpful. We used it to go from we can barely complete a beginner puzzle to thoroughly enjoying the very difficult rated puzzles. Definitely our favorite puzzle app! Please make more challenge packs.
Combining concepts from Sudoku and Kakuro but yet such a simple and addicting game. Worth playing and a great mins stimulant.
We love this game. Ive purchased 3 Tricky packs so far and just finished the last one. There are no more sets available to purchase so we thought Id go back and play them again. Is it true that you cant replay completed puzzles or am we missing something.
Once we got the hang of the interface we quite liked it for solving this type of puzzle. Relaxing and also challenging, with lots of free puzzles to train on. We would definitely chuck a few dollars to the extra packs when we get a hankering for more puzzles.
We understand how the game works. But with it being empty in the beginning, its nothing like sudoku.
We love this game & it's quite addictive! Our only request is for a more difficult level(s) after tricky or at least a larger puzzle size. We've worked through the challenge & purchased a few tricky puzzle packs but they do get quite repetitive after a while. However, maybe that's our own fault for playing too often.
Hard but doable. Starts off easy. We got stuck but once we used the help provided by the app we started to get it. We've reached the end of the challenge and will def. Pay the extra money to play more. We almost never spend actual cash for games but this one is so well done, we're looking forward to it.
We really enjoy this one. Its a step above sudoku and its really satisfying to put all the pieces in place. We play in random mode and we love the ability to choose the difficulty and size of puzzles, and even how often the different sizes recur. We can usually do the puzzles without hints but sometimes we get most of the blocks in place and then feel stuck, and we use the show us where to look hint and its right there, of course. Its the perfect amount of challenge for us without being overwhelming.
Has a good blend of easier and harder puzzles so anyone at any skill can enjoy. The hint algorithm is PHENOMENAL and will explain exactly what you're missing when you use a hint, so you can help understand what you're missing in future puzzles and improve your skills. Our one critique is that there aren't too many free puzzles and we completed the entire free portion of the game in a matter of a couple days, but the game is so good we don't mind paying for more puzzles :).
Game is absolutely awesome. Hints are great and are nice to just check if youve messed up. Very challenging and good progression in the puzzles.
We find the game extremely difficult and the help feature isnt very robust to help us grasp what Im supposed to do.
As someone that loves logic games like Picross, this scratches all the right itches. It uniquely offers really clever hints whenever you get stuck, even explaining how to get unstuck. Truly ingenious! We played for a long while before we needed to pay, and by then we were more than happy to pay a few bucks.
Even though Im pretty slow, Im hooked for sure.
We love this game. The puzzles are challenging and satisfying. Its been a long time since we downloaded a mobile game that wasnt full of ads. Instead, play through the base game ad free and learn how to do the puzzles, then you can buy additional packs of puzzles if you like it. We wish more games followed this model.
The puzzles are fun and get challenging quickly. We really enjoyed playing it. Just finished the challenges and we wish there were more! If there were more puzzles we would rate it five stars. Im glad to report there are not a ton of adds.
Good amount of challenge at higher levels. Needing to place two blanks in every row and column adds a nice crunchy dimension to the decision logic.
This app is truly excellentthe puzzles are flawless, the hint system helps you learn, the design is clean, and the developers are responsive. Plus a cute and confused fox for a mascot. We had no qualms about unlocking the endless puzzling, which is a great value since we go back to this app daily. One thing we would love to have is a stats page that kept track of your high/low/average scores and times on each type of puzzle. Thanks for a truly high-quality app.
Got frustrated at first, but once we got the hang of it we couldnt put it down. Love the game. Also this isnt one of those AD crazy games and we appreciate that. Looking forward to purchasing the full game. Suggestion: Reworking the explaining hints. We really like that it didnt just give you the answer but when we needed it the logic of the explain actions were hard to understand.
Sumaddle is a great game for fans of number puzzles. We were looking for something that was a little more challenging than sudoku, and this game really delivers. We were more than happy to pay the couple dollars for the extra puzzle sets and the endless puzzle option, and its continued to keep us entertained for several months. Our only criticism is that we sometimes get penalized for using help even when we havent asked for a hint. It seems to happen when we are trying to remove a number from the possible options in a box, and we double tap the number. If Im too slow, the game thinks we meant to put that number in, it tells us that the number is not a possible option for that rows sum, and then we get docked points. It can be a bit of a killjoy when youre proud of finishing a puzzle, and then you get the notification, Your score would have been higher if you hadnt used hints. Other than that, its still a 5-star game, and it will remain a staple on our phone.
This is really wonderful game/app. The concept of this puzzle is very simple but the difficulty can be very challenging. And the interface is quite simple to operate, all the functions are straightforward. The best part is if you stuck while playing you can use the hint. The hint has different levels, first it point out which part to think the next step, and if you still can not figure out then you can see the explanations what you can do, then if you still dont understand the clue you can tap the hint one more time to reveal the answer of that block. Normally you wont need the last step because the explanation is super clear and you can learn a lot from using the hint to get the idea for solutions.
Absolutely love Sumaddle. Really thoughtfully designed, difficulty scales incredibly well. The infinite puzzle generator is a total steal and generates puzzles with a lot of nuance. Love the game.
This is brilliant puzzle design. So simple and intuitive and addictive. Only reason it isnt 5 stars is the rating system seems to be based too heavily on the size of the puzzle. We have gotten stuck on small puzzles rated easy and breezed through big puzzles rated very difficult far too often. Not that it affects gameplay really, but there seems to be something off with the difficulty rating.
Perfect game. Just the right level of challenge and logic.
Fun game with a neat concept twist between Sudoku, KenKen and Nonogram. Sadly runs out of content fairly quickly. 50 puzzles for $0.99 which would be over with fairly quickly as well. Still giving 5 stars and would recommend picking up to enjoy for a day.
We have only positive things to say about this app. We love the puzzle concept. We love that it's more complicated than picross puzzles of the same size (like a 5×5 sumaddle is way harder than 5×5 picross) because it means we can do harder puzzles without the puzzles getting so small we can't see the numbers. LOVE the hint function, we love that it's two steps. It's such a great idea to have the pre-hint point out a general area to look at (we tend to not see solutions that are right in front of our face so this feature helps us massively). We, and we cannot stress this enough, LOVE that there are no ads. We don't think ive ever been actively pleased to pay for something in an app before, but we were smiling as we bought the $10 random generator. We have gone through and changed all the endings of our sentences to periods because when we first wrote this, every sentence ended with an exclamation point and it was unreadable. This game slaps. Dev team smacked it out of the park with this one. 5/5 would buy again we wish literally every puzzle app worked on this exact model thank you and goodnight.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 2.1.1
- Size: 26.81 MB
- iOS: 16.0 or later
- Languages: EN, DE
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: [Jonathan Buchanan]()
Last updated: 24th November 2025 | Genre: Board, Puzzle | Developer: Jonathan Buchanan