Kakuro and Hanjie :: Japanese number puzzles

Number puzzles are very popular at the moment - newspapers are full of various games, and people just cannot stop doing the little addictive puzzles.

Unless you've been living in a cave in the Tora-bora mountains for the past year then you'll have heard about Sudoku . Sudoku (a.k.a. Su Doku or Su Do Ku) is a fantastic puzzle game that everyone wants to play. However, several other Japanese puzzle games are gaining popularity too.

Second only to Su Doku in Japan is Kakro - or Kakuro as the Guardian newspaper in the UK insists on calling it. Rather like Sudoku it started in in the USA (but earlier in the 1950s), where is it known as Cross Sums.

Here's an article on Kakuro: from USA today

The Math is interesting too, and indeed Kakuro is an NP-complete problem.

Kakuro must be good - the Institute of Mathematical Statistics has a Kakuro puzzle on its Bulletin final page Jan/Feb 2006. Some free Kakuro puzzles can be found here... at this site and also here.

A tutorial can be found here.

Yet another Japanese puzzle catching on worldwide is Hanjie. This was embarrassingly called Tsunami for a while in the UK as described in this Burton Mail article on Hanjie

Also get free Hanjie puzzles and read about Hanjie strategies

The ultimate article on these Japanese puzzles is the Guardian's piece on Maru-Batsu. It's nothing like noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) of course!! You won't find many Maru-Batsu books on the birthday present lists this year!