Blog - Kakuro
Kakuro
While heading back to Tokyo, I found in Air Canada's in-flight enRoute magazine a number puzzle game called Kakuro, and I had fun solving the two included grids.
The game reminds of the more popular Sūdoku (though Kakuro is considered harder), but cases are in groups of at least 2 and you must find a combination of digits from 1 to 9 that when summed up equal to the total at the top (or left) of the group. The same digit may never be repeated within a same group.
The trick to solving these is that there are many totals for which there's only one possible combination for a specific number of digits. For example, the total 3 represented in two cases will always be 1 + 2. Same goes for 4 = 1+3, 6 = 1+2+3, 7 = 1+2+4, 10 = 1+2+3+4, 35 = 1+2+3+4+5, etc. Using these key combinations you can figure out the easy parts of the board and then fill-in the more difficult ones.
So yesterday I went to the bookstore and looked up some books to I could feed my new addiction. It seems that the game itself was invented in the U.S. and first known as "Cross Sum", but then Japanese company Nikoli picked it up and got it reintroduced in Japan as "Kakkuro" (カックロ) and throughout the world as "Kakuro". Nikoli has released 24 books of the series to date. I got #19. None of the books seem to be of a particular difficulty, they include games from easy to very hard. Each game also has completion times for beginner, intermediate and expert levels, which can be used to measure your progress.
Nikoli's English site has rules and sample problems. They also take international orders with PayPal. Of course there are also a lot of English books available elsewhere in the world.
Posted on July 29, 2007 at 10:36 | Tweet
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