Weekly pack

How the weekly pack works

The weekly pack is four puzzles to print and do with a pencil: a word search, a nonogram, a maze and a sudoku. Each puzzle gets a sheet of its own in large print, and the answers come on separate pages at the end. Every week has its own pack, and everyone who opens this page in the same week gets the same four puzzles, so a family, a club or an activity group can all work on the same sheets.

A week runs from Monday to Sunday and is counted in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), the same clock everywhere in the world. A new pack is therefore ready at the same moment for everybody: on Sunday afternoon or evening in the Americas, in the first hours of Monday in Europe, and during Monday in Asia and Australia. The box above shows the week's number and dates.

1. Choose a level. Gentle, Standard or Challenging (see the levels below). The page remembers your level, and the puzzles you tick, in this browser.
2. Tick the puzzles you want. All four are ticked at first. Each tick box says which theme, size or level that puzzle has this week. The line under the boxes counts the sheets you will use.
3. Press Print the pack. Your browser's print window opens with one page for each puzzle you ticked. Press Print with answers instead to add the answer pages at the end.
4. Choose your printer. The sheets fit Letter and A4 paper, standing upright. In the print window, choose a scale of 100% (sometimes called "actual size") rather than "shrink to fit", so the letters and numbers print as large as intended.

The answers are printed two to a page, in the same order as the puzzles, so you can hand out the puzzles and keep the answers to yourself. To look at an earlier week, press Last week's pack, then The week before as often as you like, back to the first pack, which began on October 5, 2026. This week's pack brings you back.

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Worked example

It is Wednesday, and you would like something to do with a pencil over the next few days. You open this page and leave the level on Standard. You have done plenty of mazes lately, so you untick Maze. The line under the boxes now says that the pack will print 3 sheets, or 5 sheets with answers: three puzzle sheets, and the answers two to a page.

You press Print the pack and choose your printer. Three pages come out. The first is a 13 × 13 word search with its list of 14 words, the second is a 10 × 10 nonogram with its numbers along the top and side, and the third is an Easy sudoku. You do them over the week. When you would like to check your work, you press Print with answers and ask the print window for only the last two pages: the first has the word search answer and the nonogram's picture, and the second has the sudoku's finished grid.

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The three levels

Each level uses sizes and levels that also exist on the four puzzle pages.

• Gentle: a 10 × 10 word search with 10 words, a 5 × 5 nonogram, an 8 × 8 maze and a Starter sudoku, which gives more than half of its squares as numbers already.
• Standard: a 13 × 13 word search with 14 words, a 10 × 10 nonogram, a 12 × 12 maze and an Easy sudoku, where every step is a square with only one number that fits.
• Challenging: a 15 × 15 word search with 18 words that can run in any direction, backwards included, a 15 × 15 nonogram, a 16 × 16 maze and a Hard sudoku, which also needs pairs of squares or numbers locked to one line of a box.

The Medium sudoku level is not in the packs, to keep three clear steps. You can play it, and every other size, on the puzzle pages. The word search theme changes with the week: the themes take turns.

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Tips

• Use a pencil, so you can rub out a slip. A black and white printer is fine: the sheets use only black and light grey.
• If a sheet comes out too small, check that the print window is not set to "shrink to fit" or "fit to page".
• To keep the answers for later, print without them. When you want them, press Print with answers and ask the print window for the last pages only. The page tells you how many sheets there are.
• Prefer to play on screen? Each puzzle has its own page with a daily puzzle: word search, nonograms, mazes and sudoku.
• If the text on this page looks small, press Text size at the top of the page. It changes the page only, not the printed sheets, which are already in large print.

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How these puzzles are made

The four puzzles in a pack come from the same programs that make the daily puzzles on the puzzle pages, started from a number that depends on the week, so a week's pack never changes, and no pack puzzle is the same as a daily one. Before the pack is shown, the page checks each puzzle again. In the word search, every listed word must be in the grid exactly once. In the nonogram, the numbers must match the picture and be solvable row by row and column by column without guessing, which proves there is exactly one answer. In the maze, the passages must never loop, so there is exactly one way through. In the sudoku, the puzzle must have exactly one solution, found by the techniques of its level and never by guessing. A puzzle that fails a check is left out of the pack and the page says so. Automated tests run the same checks on the packs for hundreds of weeks whenever the puzzle code, the word lists or the pictures change.

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