Why guessing feels worse
Guessing feels worse because the puzzle already has one solution. A guess is a mark you cannot defend. If it happens to be right, you skipped the reason. If it is wrong, the rest of the board starts lying to you, quietly, a few cells later.
Sitting with a stuck cell is slower. It is also the actual game.
A guess has no reason
Say a Sudoku cell still accepts 4 or 7. You pick 4 because you would like to be done. That sentence does not mention a row, a column, or a box. It mentions a wish. The grid has no use for wishes. If 4 was right, you will not know why until much later, when nothing else fits — which is the deduction you skipped. If 4 was wrong, you will spend ten minutes maintaining a fiction.
Binary Puzzle makes the same mistake cheaper and meaner. Two fills both “look possible” until you notice that one of them would copy a finished row, or make three 1s. The possibility was an incomplete scan, not a fork in the world.
A deduction you can defend
A deduction is a sentence about the board. “This cage is two cells and sums to 3, so it is 1 and 2.” “This line already has four 0s on 8×8, so the rest are 1s.” “7 has only one seat left in the box.” You could say it to someone sitting beside you. They could check it without trusting you.
That is why it feels better. Not because it is morally superior. Because it is public, in the small sense: the reason is on the paper. Guessing hides the reason, even from yourself.
Why uniqueness matters here
DIGIGMA does not ship puzzles with two legal finishes. That is the contract behind A unique solution. If two candidates still look live, you have not used a constraint yet — a peer digit, a cage total, a triple, a matching line. Uniqueness is what lets you erase. You are not choosing among real worlds. Only one world is on the board.
That is true of Easy and of Expert. Hard is a longer chain, not permission to flip a coin. The path is still one path. The scans are in the how-tos: Sudoku, Killer Sudoku, Binary Puzzle.
When you are stuck
Stop writing. Read one group at a time. Look at Draft marks that have outlived their digit. Leave the puzzle and come back; the attempt waits. Open a different game for a different kind of scan. None of those is a guess.
A hint on DIGIGMA, when you want one, is also not a guess for you. It points at a deduction that is already forced, then gives the board back. Using it takes the sit out of ranked Classic play. That is a fair trade if you would rather see the reason than protect a time. Skipping it is equally fair. Both are allowed. The how-to pages say what to look for before you ask.
The worse feeling, named
The sourness of a guess is not shame. It is the sense that you left the only path and are now walking beside it. You can always step back: undo, erase a stale mark, look at the almost-full group you skipped. The board is patient. It has been holding the next cell the whole time.