Pnyin - Picking up where sudoku left off

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Picking up where sudoku left off

(Beijing Today)
Updated: 2007-03-05 15:13


If you're not finished racking your brain for with sudoku puzzles, it may
be time to give the newest puzzle crazy a try: kakuro, sudoku's big
brother. Kakuro is a new craze in the US, Japan and many European
countries. If you're nuts about sudoku, then kakuro may be a dream come
true


If you read any newspapers or magazines with a puzzle section, you'll see
that crosswords and sudok were popular puzzle in China during 2006.
Beijing Today covered sudoku last year.

But this year, a new puzzle is on the rise: kakuro.

Last year, ABC News reported, "The popularity of kakuro now has eclipsed
that of sudku in Japan and the United Kingdom. Now, it's coming back to
the United States.�Kakuro seldom appears in Chinese newspapers and
magazines, but brain-teaser fans can't afford to miss out on it.In China,
the first group of kakuro fans developed as an offshoot of sudoku
addicts. I met one kakuro addict among a sudoku group.

Cheng Hao, a college student in Shenzhen, is a sudoku addict and has
played kakuro for almost a month. When he searched for sudoku on the
Internet, he found kakuro incidentally. "I love kakuro even more than
sudoku now," he said, "Kakuro is more a logic puzzle than sudoku, so I am
crazy about it"As far as I know, I'm the only karo player amongst my
friends, so I usually play online," he added

What is kakuro:

At first glance, a kakuro grid looks a little like a crossword grid.
Similar to sudoku, it is all about numbers, but it does require some
mathematical reasoning. The difference between kakuro and sudoku is that,
with a kakuro grid, the numbers indicate the sum total of all the
individual cells in that row or column. Kakuro is a logic game that is
often called the mathematical transliteration of a crossword puzzle.

The word "kakuro" comes from the Japanese kasan kurosu (cross), a
portmanteau of the words for 'addition' and ��crossword'. It is believed
the word was crby Japanese businessman McKee Kaji.


Kakuro is thought to originate from the 1960s. The first puzzles,
originally translated as "Cross Sums," were published in 1966 by Dell
Magazines, the same American publication whichne decade later introduced
sudoku to the world.

Just like what happened with Sudoku, the market craze and the re-branding
from Cross Sums to Kakuro occurred only after the puzzle was imported to
Japan, improved, and exported back to the West

The numbers given in a Kakuro are like clues. Each is a total to a sum,
and you have to work out which numbers add up to the total to fill the
blank squares. The aim of the game is to fill all the blank squares in
the using only numbers 1 to 9, and that the numbers entered add up to the
corresponding clues. When the grid is filled out, the puzzle is complete.
If you can add small numbers, then you can play kakuro.










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