The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[kate21]

hi,
i'm addicted to kakuro, sudoku is history!
anyone share this feelling?
http://www.kakurolive.com

[lunababy_moonchild]

hi,
i'm addicted to kakuro, sudoku is history!
anyone share this feelling?
http://www.kakurolive.com

No. I don't think that we have gotten to the end of sudoku by a long chalk and, since addition is a skill that I don't possess, Kakuro is totally out of my league.

Good luck and have fun though.

Luna

[tso]

I find Kakuro boring. They seem to lack the 'falling-into-place' point of Sudoku. Work on one side of the puzzle often seems unrelated to the other end, and each puzzle seems indistinguishable from the last.

On the other hand, years ago I tired of Sudoku -- back then, there were very few puzzles available that required any advanced tactics, there was no software to assist in auto-pencil-marking, filtering, etc, there were no English language discussion boards advancing complex solving methods, etc. It didn't occur to me back then how deep the puzzle might be. Perhaps Kakuro is just as deep.

[PaulIQ164]

I find it hard to imagine how there could be more than one tactic in a Kakuro really. It's essentially just cross-referencing lists of possibilities, as far as I can see. But maybe I'm wrong?

[kate21]

sorry you feel that way,
i thought you'll be happy to try a new thing

[Bigtone53]

I find Kakuro boring. They seem to lack the 'falling-into-place' point of Sudoku.

Sorry, but I agree. The London Evening Standard does these up to Moderate level (and a bit bigger than the example Kate gave) but the disjointed nature of the puzzle does not hit my button intellectually.. The Standard has also introduced a new thing where numbers are blacked out in turn to give no common numbers in each row and column and a continuous shape. I forget its name but it is to my mind more fun than Kakuro.

[Sabreman64]

I've become hooked on kakuro. I do the kakuro every day in thegrauniad, and now Puzzler Media have launched a new Kakuro magazine which will help feed my addiction. I'm still hooked on sudoku though, and killer sudoku too.

Anyone tried any Slitherlink puzzles?

[afjt]

I began doing the occasional kakuro a few weeks ago when I ran out of killer sudoku to do. The website I found had 2 levels, so obviously I chose the harder one. 2 hours later, I was tearing my hair out as I couldn't make any progress, so I decided to do the simple one, if only to restore my confidence levels. Guess what...? The solution wasn't unique ! No wonfer I had got stuck on the harder one. So beware... there are websites producing invalid puzzles (and trying to sell puzzle software on the back of it !)

[udosuk]

Hi afjit could you please show us the kakuro sites you found? You certainly made me itchy to tackle "the harder one" now... ^_^

[afjt]

The site I found is http://www.kakuropuzzle.com.
Today's and yesterday's puzzles look relatively easy, but last week was when it had a definitely non-unique easy puzzle, and hard puzzles which possibly weren't unique. Unfortunately, the site doesn't have an archive, but I may still have a printed copy of the puzzles, so if you want, I will try to reproduce them here for you.

[afjt]

If you take a look at today's beginner puzzle on that site, which has only 8 boxes to fill in, you will soon see that there are 2 possible solutions, which have precisely no squares in common, so if you were trying to solve it purely by logic, you would get no squares filled in at all !

[udosuk]

Agree... in fact there are probably more than 2 solutions, with 3 among them as following:

Code: Select all

 41   41   14
1253 2351 2351
2341 1243 1423
 12   12   21

And then there are 3 huge "impossipuzzles" there, but if there are also multiple solutions then I won't bother...

[afjt]

By the time you had looked, the puzzle had changed. Anyway, I think we agree that that one is a site to avoid !

[vvill]

Kakuro is okay but I get a bit sick of having to use the same process / technique, and doing maths in my head all the time.

Slitherlink is a lot of fun. I would love to get a collection of those puzzles to do.

I quite enjoy the bigger puzzles of this type too:

http://www.nikoli.co.jp/puzzles/14/index_text-e.htm

[Nick70]

Anyone tried any Slitherlink puzzles?

I love Slither Link. It's a great puzzle to play on a palmtop with a touch screen.

There's a free program here called Loopy that generates puzzles more interesting than the ones I found on the Sudoku magazine by Puzzler.