Word: sudoku
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Will Shortz is to puzzles what Oprah is to books - an endorsement by the New York Times crossword editor is as good as gold. He helped popularize Sudoku in the U.S. and has sold more than 5 million volumes of the number-sequencing game. Now he's moved on to another numerical brainteaser, KenKen, which boasts something Sudoku does not: actual math. The game was invented by a teacher in Tokyo to help kids learn arithmetic; kenken means "cleverness squared" in Japanese...
...reception has been good, though not Sudoku-mania good. (Then again, Sudoku wasn't an instant hit either; an Indiana architect devised the game in the 1970s, but it languished for decades under the unfortunate name Number Place.) Only five years old, KenKen already appears in the Times of London and Le Figaro in Paris, and it's coming soon to an iPhone near...
Will Shortz is to puzzles what Oprah is to books - an endorsement by the New York Times crosswords editor is as good as gold. He's sold more than 5 million volumes of Sudoku games and has now moved on to KenKen, a numerical logic puzzle invented by a Japanese educator as a clever way to teach math to kids (the name means "cleverness squared" in Japanese). Shortz held the first U.S. KenKen tournament this weekend at the 32nd annual American Crosswords Puzzle tournament in Brooklyn, which drew more than 900 people from across the world - including KenKen's creator...
...Unlike Sudoku, KenKen involves arithmetic. What's it like to be straying from word puzzles into math...
First of all, I love almost any kind of puzzle. My sense is that most crossword people are not interested in Sudoku or KenKen, and vice versa. I'm in the minority that is crazy about all three varieties. I think KenKen is bringing in a whole new solver. (Read "Who Needs Sudoku...