![]() ![]() ![]() Unlike with online Sudoku and Kakuro games, there's no ability to include all the possible numbers with small figures, only to add the final large number. Right now, though, The New York Times' online interface is weak. The New York Times started publishing KenKen puzzles online in November, and The Boston Globe, The Houston Chronicle and other papers have signed up as well. launch came in October after Nextoy President Robert Fuhrer signed up for licensing and marketing rights outside Japan. Happily, KenKen puzzles can be found elsewhere, too, as they follow the import trail blazed by Sudoku. I gleefully polished off the book by Miyamoto and Shortz in my spare time over a few days. After more than an hour and a half wrestling with it, I filled in 20 numbers-and found I'd made a mistake. The third puzzle in this story is an example. They don't tell you which mathematical operator you need to use, so there's an extra layer of deduction required. ![]() The hardest puzzles add a major new wrinkle. In the harder puzzles toward the end of the book, I twice had to resort to my last-ditch technique, speculative methods: supposing this cell has a 2, then that one must have a 1, etc., until I reached a contradiction or solution. Including a wider range of operators can make things harder, but even puzzles with only addition and subtraction can be a good challenge. And don't forget that 1 is another prime factor! I was thrown off by one puzzle where three cells in an L-shaped cage multiplied to 192, thinking it had to be 8 times 8 times 3, but then I realized my error: another combination was 4 times 6 times 8. But with a three-cell, L-shaped cage in KenKen, you also must consider the possibility of 1, 1, and 4.Īdd multiplication into the mix, and you start grappling with prime factors. In both KenKen and Kakuro, with three cells in a row adding to 6, the only possible numbers are 1, 2, and 3. Kakuro fans will have to un-learn the rule that trains you to break down sums into unique numbers. That means one is a 1 and the other a 2, but you have to figure out which goes where. For example, a two-cell cage with the number 3 and a plus sign means that the two unknown numbers must be added together to produce 3. ![]() To fill the cells in the cage, you must combine the numbers in the cells using the operator. A cage can be horizontal or vertical, but it also can span multiple rows and columns if it's L-shaped or square, for example.Įach cage contains a number and the mathematical operator. So where's the math fit in? Various groups of boxes are surrounded by a bold line, called a cage. With a 6圆 puzzle, the numbers range from 1 to 6, and so on. With a 3x3 grid, each row and column has the numbers 1, 2, and 3. In general, the larger the grid, the harder the puzzle, though several other elements factor into the difficulty.Īs with Sudoku, each horizontal row and vertical column gets each number exactly once, but you have to figure out the proper places. Here's the basic KenKen description: It's got square puzzle grids - 3x3 is the easiest, and the largest I've tackled is 9x9. Shortz, The New York Times' crossword puzzle editor since 1993 and probably the most famous puzzle guru around, praises KenKen as a puzzle that's easy to learn yet spans a range from simple to very difficult, and he's right. It took me about 30 seconds to grasp the rules of KenKen and another 30 seconds to get sucked into the book. "Ken" means wisdom in Japanese, thus KenKen means wisdom squared-or perhaps cleverness squared, depending on your translation. It is written by Shortz and Tetsuya Miyamoto, the Japanese math teacher who invented KenKen. It arrived in the form of a book-a review copy of Will Shortz Presents KenKen Easiest Volume 1 from St. Happily, just as I was getting disillusioned with Kakuro, KenKen stepped into my life. But I spend hours glued to computer screens all day, and I enjoy the paper-based puzzles, especially when stuffed into a commuter train. To be fair, I've found that ATK Solutions' Kakuro puzzles evidently are created with a different algorithm that can offer a much bigger challenge. It still can be a challenge to spot the constraints, figure the possible combinations, and make the necessary deductions, but I no longer eagerly seek out fresh Kakuro puzzles online or in the daily paper. After a year of doing Kakuro, though, the puzzles grew a little mechanical. ![]()
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