Su Do Ku

The first news about this new grid game came when I was in Bangalore, during the two month holidays I had before I joined my job. The article came in Business Standard. The article spoke in lengths about the craze the game had created in Japan and other eastern countries. The game was moving to other parts of the world and was starting to create flutters in Europe.

The article claimed that the game would soon take over the US and the Indian subcontinent. The article also said that even thought the puzzle looks simple, its not an easy puzzle to solve. It required the person to use reasoning and logic to solve it, and the article also added that a daily practice of Su Do Ku might keep the person’s brain sharp.

Within 2 weeks of the reading the article, I started seeing the articles in newspapers. It was for the readers to solve the puzzle. I subscribe to The Hindu, and it too has a daily puzzle to be solved of varying degrees of difficulty. Even though I used to see the article daily, I never attempted to solve one until yesterday.

As usual, I reached home without anything in my mind. Somehow the size of the book I am reading presently puts me off, so I could not muster the energy to continue with the book. That’s when I saw the puzzle and decided to solve it. The puzzle was marked as a Very Easy one and so I thought of trying it.

The puzzle requires the solver to fill up a 9X9 square grid with numbers from 1-9 in every row and every column. The condition is that a number cannot appear twice in a row or a column. The big 9X9 square is divided into 9 3X3 squares, and these 3X3 squares should in turn contain the numbers from 1-9 only once.

I messed the first one up, and by the time I finished messing with my second puzzle, I figured out the way to solve it. So I got 2 more puzzles from the stack of old newspapers and I was off.

By the time I slept at 12am, I had solved 4 puzzles. One Very Easy, one Easy and two Medium. I tried my best with a Hard puzzle, but even after breaking my head for 45 minutes, I could not solve it.

The Very Easy ones are real easy, I was able to solve them in 10-15 minutes. The Easy ones took 20-25 minutes while the medium ones took 30-40 minutes. So going by the standards, a Hard one would take near an hour.

Shall definitely solve one in the near future!!!!