Making "Rodoku"

Sudoku is a very popular, deceptively simple game. (It's somewhat been overtaken by KenKen, but the available puns just aren't there. What was I going to do, distribute a "BenDen" card? What about Carol and Jeremy?) The basic idea behind Sudoku is that you have a 9x9 grid subdivided into 9 3x3 grids. The digits 1–9 must be arranged on the overall grid such that no row, column, or 3x3 grid contains any duplicate digits. The number of digits revealed at the start influence just how difficult it is to complete the puzzle. The best puzzles have interesting looking starting grids that eventually lead to only a single solution, without requiring the solver to resort to too much trial and error.

My idea was to construct a Sudoku grid that would spell out HAPPY NEW YEAR. Well, right away you are confronted with a few problems. In those 12 letters there are duplicated As, Ps, Es, and Ys. The first issue is that you just can't spell out the phrase on a single row, or even on two rows. The second issue is that there are really only 8 distinct letters there. The second issue is pretty easily addressed with the addition of an exclamation point, but the first issue is thorny.

Note that I had absolutely no intention of creating a Sudoku that could actually be solved, but it was extremely important to me that it at least look like a real puzzle. That meant that it had to meet the basic constraints. Plus, it had to look nice, in that it had to have a reasonable distribution of letters across the entire grid but still be immediately readable.

Over the course of a month or so I would sit down and try to lay out the letters on a grid to make something that I was proud of. And every time I'd eventually get to the point where I'd be trying to, say, put down the word YEAR in a diagonal and realize that the E would line up with the E of NEW in some other part of the grid.