Game of the Week: Kakuro

 

Thirteen years ago one August evening I found a Kakuro puzzle in my local Gainesville Sun newspaper...and successfully completed it.  Since then this Japanese number logic game has been one of my favorites as I continued to do the Sun's weekly puzzles (until they stopped publishing them a few years ago ), Internet Kakuro, and an excellent series of Kakuro puzzle books with "White/Green/Brown/Black Belt" in their titles, depending on the books' different graded levels of difficulty.  Kakuro has an older name, Cross Sums, which I still come across from time to time in some of those variety puzzle magazines on display in grocery stores and pharmacies.  They look on the surface like crossword puzzles, only the "words", crisscrossing both horizontally and vertically, are instead single-digit numerals that range from 1 to 9.  The number appearing either to the left of a horizontal row or above a vertical one tell what the sum of the row or column's string of numerals is, with the crucial stipulation that no numeral appears twice for each summed number.  Some combinations are unique...only their arrangement has to be determined.  So if you see the number "17" for two spaces, you already know the combo of 8 and 9 are in the answer, but you still have to figure the order. At the start of a game I always go around the grid looking for easy solutions until I get to the more challenging sections...when I get to this point I'll usually start writing the options for each square in small handwriting (much the way many tackle solutions to Sudoku, Kakuro's "sister" puzzle).  As with just about any game/puzzle, there are guides you can study to give you hints to make your playing more successful from the start, but for me part of the fun in getting involved in a new game with its rules and special strategies is in discovering different "tricks of the trade" for myself as I go along.  I almost always carry in my pocket a ripped-out page from a Kakuro book or a puzzle printed off the Internet.  If you're a Sudoku buff why not try Kakuro...but start out with the easy levels...