Easy Sudoku
This board is graded easy in a precise sense: from the first move to the last there is always at least one empty cell with only one digit left that can legally go in it. You never have to look at a whole row or a whole box to make progress, and you never have to write anything down. Fill the obvious cell, and the next obvious cell appears somewhere else on the grid.
What makes a sudoku easy here is the deduction, not the blanks
Most puzzle sites decide difficulty by how many digits they leave behind. This one grades by solving the puzzle the way a person would and recording the hardest technique it was forced to reach for. Easy means one thing and nothing else: the whole board fell to naked singles. If a board could not be finished that way, the digit that would have caused the trouble was put straight back before you ever saw the grid.
The naked single, in full
Look at one empty cell and nothing else. Read the eight digits in its row, the eight in its column, and the eight in its box – twenty distinct cells in total. If those between them already show eight of the nine digits, exactly one digit is left, and it belongs in that cell. There is no cleverness in it and no alternative to check. The only skill is noticing which cell is nearly surrounded, which is why the fastest way through a grid like this is to work outward from wherever the board is already crowded rather than starting at the top left.
You will not need the Notes button on this grade
The pencil-mark habit – writing every candidate into every cell before making a move – is a genuine technique and it is wasted here. Notes exist for positions where you have to compare cells against each other, and an easy board never produces one: the next move is always readable from a single cell. If you find yourself pencilling on this page, you have almost certainly missed a cell that was already down to one candidate, and the Hint button will find it and name the deduction it used.
Fewer blanks would not make it easier
The generator does not aim at a clue count. It removes digits in a random order and keeps each removal only while the puzzle still has exactly one solution and still falls to singles alone, so the number of givens is a by-product of that process rather than a setting. Boards from this page come out in the mid-twenties, which is roughly where the harder grades land too. Adding six more givens to a puzzle that already needs a chain of deductions does not make it easy; taking six away from this one would not make it hard, it would just make it ambiguous, and the generator would refuse it.
Timing yourself on it
A clock starts when the grid paints and stops when the last cell is right. There is no pause and no record kept anywhere, so it is only useful against itself: a fair benchmark is your own time on the same grade a week later. If you want the next rung, medium adds exactly one new idea – the digit that has only one home left in a unit – and nothing beyond it.