Claiming practice sheets
A digit that has to sit inside one box, even though the line decides which cell. Every puzzle here needs at least one.
The elimination nobody looks for
Pointing and claiming are the same observation read in two directions. Pointing says: inside this box, the digit can only go in one row — so remove it from the rest of that row. Claiming says: inside this row, the digit can only go in one box — so remove it from the rest of that box.
Most people learn pointing and stop there, because pointing shows itself. You look at a box, you see three cells in a line, you act. Claiming has no such picture. You look at a row where a digit has two or three homes, notice they all happen to sit in the same box, and the conclusion is somewhere else — in the other six cells of that box. There is nothing to see at the place where the elimination happens, which is why it sits on the board for ten minutes while you look elsewhere.
Spotting one, in order
- Take one digit and one line. A row or a column, not a box. Count how many empty cells in that line can still take the digit.
- Check whether all of them fall in the same box. Two homes in one box is the usual case. Three also works. If even one home sits outside that box, claiming does not apply — the digit is free to leave.
- Now the box is constrained, not the line. All remaining homes of the digit in that box are inside the line you just looked at, so the digit must be somewhere on that line. It cannot also be in the other six cells of the box.
- Cross the digit out of those six cells. Only the digit you were tracking; nothing else changes.
The step people skip is 3. The line did not teach you anything about the line — it taught you something about the box. If you find yourself looking for a place to write a digit after spotting the pattern, you have read it backwards.
What the grader guarantees
Every puzzle on this sheet needs at least one claiming elimination, and nothing on it asks for more than one tier above: the hardest extra step you can meet is an X-Wing or a single-digit colouring. The filter never relaxes to fill a sheet, so if one ever comes up short, press New set.
One honest note about this sheet: claiming is usually a small move. It takes one candidate out of one box and rarely finishes a puzzle on its own. That is why every puzzle here also needs other work — the sheet is not "six puzzles about claiming", it is six puzzles where claiming is somewhere on the path. That is how the technique actually appears in play.
Printing it
Scale 100%, not "fit to page". Four per page gives 78 mm boards for handing out; two per page leaves room to annotate.
Candidate marks help less here than on the wing sheets but still help: to see that all of a digit's homes are in one box you need to know where its homes are, and that means marks. Print one sheet with marks to learn the scan, then a second without, and see whether you can still find it. Answer page prints the solutions separately at the end.
Where to go next
The full guide to claiming has the worked position and the sentence worth memorising: pointing constrains the line, claiming constrains the box. If pointing is not automatic yet, drill the pointing sheet first — the two are one skill with two directions, and learning them together is easier than learning them a month apart.
When box-line work stops being the bottleneck, naked pairs and hidden pairs are the next tier up.