I'm a fan of number logic puzzle games, and that includes Sudoku, Kakuro, and Hidato. Another one that is rising in popularity is KenKen, invented in 2003 by Tetsuya Miyamoto and embraced and published by Will Shortz and the New York Times in a series of books...the above one I bought recently at Books-a-Million. It bears a limited similarity with Sudoku in that each puzzle's grid of rows and columns will be filled with unique integers going from 1 to whatever the dimension size is...hence a 4X4 puzzle will contain numbers from 1 to 4 and one with a 6X6 grid goes from 1 to 6. That said, KenKen greatly differs from Sudoku in that one must employ the indicated operation with the marked-off spaces to fill in the numbers. So looking above again, "1-" means the two numbers differ by one, "12x" means the numbers multiplied together equal 12, "2÷" means that one number divided by the other equals 2, and "9+" means that the sum of the blocked off numbers in the row or column equals 9. Like Sudoku and Kakuro, I tend to write in the blank squares the possible numbers in tiny form, and then write the solution over them when I discover it. Also, like just about any puzzle KenKen varies in difficulty from puzzle to puzzle...in the book I'm working on now they start at "Easy" and progress to "Medium" and then "Challenging". Miyamoto is a math teacher and reportedly invented KenKen as a way to train his students to combine logic and the four basic arithmetical operations. For me it's a fun variation from the other paper number logic puzzles out there, and I tend to tear pages out of the book to work on whenever convenient...
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