I never thought my wife would like my new mistress so much. Then again, she introduced us. And I don’t mind sharing.
Meet sudoku, the most popular newspaper puzzle since the crossword was introduced in the 1920s.
The rules are simple. Put the numbers 1 through 9 in each row, column and 3-by-3 square of a 9-by-9 grid. Unlike crosswords (my former mistress), sudoku puzzles come with some of the boxes filled in. Generally, the fewer the starting numbers, the harder the puzzle. And though it’s a number puzzle, it’s not math.
On a recent weekend, my wife and I were doing the Sunday New York Times crossword in The Denver Post, and she spied the number puzzle on the same page. An hour later, she announced she had solved it – which in our house translates roughly as “I bet you can’t do this.”
Since, we’ve become insatiable sudoku addicts. And we’re not alone. Since sudoku’s introduction in the United States in April, nearly all of the nation’s major newspapers – and many smaller ones – have started carrying the number puzzles. And that means a lot of Americans – who have nothing on the sudoku-crazed British – are spending mornings wearing through newsprint with their erasers and nights waking up sweating, trying to place 7s in imaginary little boxes.
Because I had to feed a growing addiction, I recently asked a Barnes & Noble clerk where I could find the puzzle-book section. He walked me over and asked if I wanted anything in particular. “Sudoku,” I told him. “This entire shelf,” he showed me. “Last week, we had one or two books; now it’s a whole shelf.” I bought two. And I’ve since acquired three more.
Apparently, so has everyone else. One week in October, “Sudoku for Dummies” was the No. 2 best-selling nonfiction paperback in Denver. And Amazon
.com offers nearly 200 sudoku books.
So, with a name like sudoku, is it a Japanese puzzle? Not exactly.
The first sudoku-style puzzles appeared in the U.S. in the 1970s. A puzzle called Number Place, with basically the same premise, appeared in a magazine published by Dell. But it didn’t catch on here the first time around.
In Japan, though, number puzzles are far more popular than word puzzles. That has something to do with the complexity of the written Japanese language. The Nikoli publishing company imported the puzzles from the United States, branded them as sudoku, and established guidelines for how starting grids should appear (“in a pleasing symmetrical pattern”). By 1986, sudoku was a big hit in Japan. And it still is.
In 1997, Wayne Gould, a retired New Zealand judge, discovered the puzzles on a trip to Tokyo. He spent six years creating a computer program and website (sudoku.com) dedicated to sudoku. A year ago, he introduced the puzzle to an editor at The Times in London, and the paper decided to print it.
In Great Britain, Gould says, when one of the dozen or so national newspapers does something, the rest follow suit. So within a few months, all the major British newspapers were carrying sudoku.
The first major newspaper in the United States to publish a sudoku was the New York Post, which began running the puzzles in May. Others, such as the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and USA Today, soon followed suit.
In the United States, sudoku is still at the craze phase. In the UK, it’s an obsession. But Gould thinks Americans will catch up. “It got off to a much more explosive factor in the U.K.,” he says. “I think the United States will get to that stage. It’s more like a slow-burning fuse than a great explosion.”
Gould provides sudoku puzzles to more than 300 newspapers worldwide – for free. After creating his sudoku program, which he sells online for $14.95, it occurred to him he needed to spread the word about sudoku. “I realized I wouldn’t sell my program unless people knew what a sudoku puzzle was. That was the first objective. The second objective was to spread the popularity of the puzzle.”
So far, so good. Sudoku is being called the Rubik’s cube of the 21st century.
But then, Rubik’s cube lost popularity after a couple of years, and now it’s mainly considered an ’80s thing. Sudoku is likely to have a longer run. But will it have the staying power of, say, the crossword, the most popular of American puzzles?
Will Shortz, the New York Times crossword editor and National Public Radio’s puzzlemaster, isn’t sure the two should be compared. “Crosswords take into account every field of human knowledge,” he says. “The scope of crosswords is enormous, both in terms of vocabulary and knowledge. Sudoku is a self-contained logic puzzle.”
He added, “You don’t have to know anything with sudoku. A smart 10-year-old can do sudoku.”
But he does think it’s here to stay. Shortz, an admitted sudoku addict himself, says it’s not going to be a passing fad. People said the crossword fad would fade when it was introduced in 1924. “Crosswords were a craze in 1924-1925, along with many other things in the ’20s – like goldfish swallowing and flagpole sitting. And mahjong. And you don’t hear a lot about mahjong nowadays.”
The Denver Post publishes six puzzles a week (two easy, two medium and two hard), but it’s not long before you need more than one a day, and you begin yearning for more – and harder – puzzles.
And there’s surely no end to the number of puzzles that are waiting to be published. It is estimated that there are 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 possible sudoku grids.
That’s more than 6 sexillion combinations – for a puzzle whose name translates roughly as “single number.”
Still, I think our sordid affair might be nearing an end. I just met her sister, kakuro, the next big number puzzle out of Japan, and currently a hit in Great Britain.
They say she’s slightly more difficult – and more like a crossword puzzle.
I hope my wife likes her.
Denver Post letters editor Cohen Peart can be reached at cpeart@denverpost.com.
