Word: sudoku
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...latest fad is Sudoku, a number game in a box, In less than two years, the puzzle has won a popularity that verges on the epidemic. It now appears daily in newspapers on all six inhabited continents and has spawned hundreds of magazines, not to mention dozens of books that elbow traditional puzzle volumes off the Barnes & Noble shelves...
...What might give Sudoku brain cred to a veteran puzzle-solver like me? Two things. About a dozen of the book versions of the game carry the august authorship of Will Shortz, editor of the New York Times crossword, and star of the spiffy new documentary Wordplay, which opens this weekend in select cities. And among Sudoku's greatest fans is my sister-in-law, Pat Thompson Corliss...
...comic books, especially those produced by Disney). I was hooked, instantly and eternally, not so much by the crosswords as by the number and word games that filled out the Dell pages. So I figured I owed her, and Shortz, a grudging attempt to get with the Sudoku program...
...Based on a Japanese phrase for "single numbers," Sudoku is actually an American invention. In 1979 Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games featured a puzzle called Number Place: nine boxes of nine boxes -imagine a big tic-tac-toe board with a tiny tic-tac-toe board in each square. The object is to fill in the numbers 1 through 9, nine times, so that no number is repeated in a horizontal or vertical line, or in any of the small boxes...
...task force internally at Nintendo," Iwata says, "whose objective was to come up with games that would attract people who don't play games." Last year they set out to design a game for the elderly. Amazingly, they succeeded. Brain Age is a set of electronic puzzles (including Sudoku) that purports to keep aging minds nimble. It was released for one of Nintendo's portable platforms, the Nintendo DS, last year. So far, it has sold 2 million copies, many of them to people who had never bought a game before...