the numbers must occur only once,” shortened to Sudoku. In 1997, retired New Zealander Wayne Gould noticed a Japanese Sudoku book and was intrigued.

Sudoku is short for “Suji wa Dokushin ni Kagiru,” or “Numbers should be single, a bachelor.” Maki started Nikoli, Japan’s first puzzle magazine, and in 1983, he founded the puzzle ...

And Amazon .com offers nearly 200 sudoku books. So, with a name like sudoku, is it a Japanese puzzle? Not exactly. The first sudoku-style puzzles appeared in the U.S. in the 1970s.

Sudoku's earliest known appearance was in the United States, in a 1979 issue of the magazine Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games. It caught on in Japan after a publisher in that country began to ...

Chambers and Penguin have published books titled “Beyond Sudoku” and “The Monster Book of Japanese Puzzles” respectively. And many more puzzles are available online, including some here.

Tim Kelly and Elaine Lies Updated Mon, August 16, 2021, 6:45 PM PDT FILE PHOTO: 'Father of Sudoku' Maki Kaji holds copies of the latest sudoku puzzles at the Book Expo, in New York ...

Three weeks before, no sudoku books were on USA Today’s top 150 list. In the first week of September, there are six. There’s a Web site, of course: www.sudoku.com.

Sudoku may be gaining momentum, but Universal still has 600 crossword subscribers in print and online. Even the Godfather of Crosswords, New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz, is OK with Sudoku.

A Japanese brainteaser that has quietly appeared in puzzle magazines in Asia and North America for years, sudoku hit Britain in the pages of the Times newspaper in November.

Mr. Morinishi is the first Japanese to win the tournament and bring the title to the country where sudoku, the numerical puzzle featuring a 9-by-9 grid, was popularized in the 1980s.

Mr. Morinishi is the first Japanese to win the tournament and bring the title to the country where sudoku, the numerical puzzle featuring a 9-by-9 grid, was popularized in the 1980s.