I agree that there should be more defined rules should be set. Based off of the runs that have been approved so far the settings that enable pre-filled notes, show mistakes, etc have been used in at least one run currently on the leaderboard. As for the timing of the runs, the current first-place run is timed based off of the sum of the IGT so that's what it seems like the timing is at this point.

I believe that there should also be categories for each type of board like one of the other sudoku games that has a speedrun leaderboard: Sudoku Zenkai ( https://www.speedrun.com/sudoku_zenkai ). As well as following other Windows Series games there should be a mobile games category if the experience is that different than it is on PC I haven't personally tried it on mobile yet. You also bring up an interesting thing about mistakes there could be mistakeless categories encouraging against the random guessing I end up doing in my runs.

Sum of IGT makes sense for the "Full Game" runs to me it's just not actually written anywhere lol. Should just be done like how we do it for Microsoft Solitaire where the boards for mobile and PC are separate. For individual difficulties it's more intuitive but even then I'd just explicitly state those kinds of things in the rules to avoid confusion.

But yeah I have played a lot of Sudoku and when this is a little bit better defined I'll definitely be playing. I was going to submit a request for this game and noticed that this had just been created. So, if you need help or someone willing to work on that stuff I'd be happy to help.

I think having the timer be done as real world time starting when you reset and ending when you input the last number makes sense. There is technique involved in switching between the modes and places where you can get time saves. You can tap on the screen to perform animation skips, and you can memorize placement of buttons. To just use sum of IGT would drop any technique you can put into the switching of difficulties.

You do raise some good points with regards to using IGT. I'm not opposed to it, but I think it's just more fun to use real time, and frankly easier as well as a don't have to do math to figure out if you got the record or not.

The skill level is actually quite approachable. The way you play a speedrun is different than just playing Sudoku. We get to do things the developers maybe didn't intend but allow, such as exploiting the notes and highlighting to be able to quickly see where possibilities are and begin to make guesses til we find the right one. Honestly, I picked it up very quickly and got WR for the Irregulars category within my first hour of speedrunning it, and I've never tried to casually play Sudoku in grandmaster or anything, if I'm playing casually I'd do Medium or Hard. Once you stop playing Sudoku and start speedrunning Microsoft Sudoku, then it's a whole new game and boy howdy is it fun 😁. So accessibility wise, maybe some tutorials/guides would help to show how to play the game the speedrunning way. I don't think the inclusion of all the difficulties really matters, you'd be surprised how easy grandmaster actually is once you know the mechanics we employ in our runs. It's mostly guess and check, but first figuring out the safest place to make guesses.

Theoretically, a mistakeless run is already encouraged by the ruleset, as every mistake you make costs you time.