While we were in the UK this summer, I became one of the last people on the
face of the earth to discover Sudoku, the numeric crossword puzzle. We were
riding a train when Sarah passed over the newspaper she had been writing on, and
I thought she just wanted help finding a word. Instead, she wanted me to look at
a number grid and tell her if she had filled it out correctly.
I hadn’t seen the game before, so I read the rules and immediately saw that
this was no ordinary brain-teaser. Instead of adding or subtracting numbers to
get a particular result, the object was to use the numbers one through nine in a
row – but the catch was that whatever row those numbers intersected with could
not already contain the number that went into that black. As it turned
out, she had worked the puzzle incorrectly and all we had to use was a pen, but
luckily there were two on the page. So we were able to start over and figure the
game out together. The entire time we were working the puzzle, I was thinking "why
isn’t this a Pocket PC game?"
Of course, after returning to the states I found out that there were Sudoku
versions available to download. I tired one version that looked good on its
site, but would not run on my iPAQ 4700. Then I tried
Japan Crossword,
but while fun – it wasn’t true Sudoku.
Recently Alison with Astraware sent me a link to their new Sudoku game which
will be available tomorrow. I have been playing Astraware Sudoku like a
fiend, and am happy to report that it is exactly what I had in mind when I was
wishing someone would port the game from print to PDA. If you like
brain-teasers, if you like figuring out logic based puzzles, and even if you
aren’t good at math – you should give Sudoku a try.
Fortunately, Astraware Sudoku runs perfectly on my PPC-6700…in fact, I am
about to start yet another game. :0)
