Tuesday, April 04, 2006

meet Kakuro - sudoku's big brother

karuro aka Cross-Sums, is yet another number game from japan, very difficult but highly addictive. It looks like a typical crossword puzzle with numbers in place of alphabets.


just like a crossword puzzle kakuro have white empty squares which needs to be filled and black squares with number which are called "clues".

Lets take a smaller sub-section on our original puzzle

  • take bottom horizontal row. Here the "clue" is number 9, notice that number 9 is written on top half of the black box which means the clue is for horizontal white boxes.
  • similarly number 3 on top row is in lower half of the black square which tells us that the clue is for vertical squares.
  • clue number 9 tells us to find a combination which adds up to 9(hence the name "cross-sum"). possible combinations are - 1+8, 2+7, 3+6 and 4+5.
  • for clue no 3(for vertical white boxes) we have only combination - 1+2.
  • rest of the arrangement is similar to sudoku

    There is only one rule: You can't put two or more duplicate numbers for a single clue(similar to sudoku).

    well that's it! take out your pencils and jump right into it!

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