And if you haven't seen it, Knuth has a whole section on puzzles in his newer writings. Always fun to flip through.
(If you want to see the numbers fill up, I have that at https://taeric.github.io/Sudoku.html)
That sounds really interesting—can you share which book / fascicle / article that's at?
On his homepage, he also links "A Potpourri of Puzzles" at https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/fasc9b.ps.gz.
fchief•12h ago