OnlineMindPuzzles.com

Generally speaking, flowers, chocolates, and moonlit walks on the beach are considered romantic by young couples and old alike, all around the world. However, everyone is different, and one couple was drawn together by their love of math and puzzles, and has channeled that love into a website that is now picking up quite a bit of traffic and visitors!

Mathdoku.com is the online version of KenKen, which is a variant of Sudoku. Math puzzles really, in laymens terms! The site offers several different types of math puzzles, and they start out with fairly simple puzzles in 4×4 blocks, that only use the numbers 1- 4, and work up to puzzles that use 8×8 blocks.

Currently the site is now offering close to 1,500 puzzles, and receives almost 15,000 puzzle lovers daily. Players currently are timed on each puzzle, and the site offers hints to those that find themselves stumped for an answer. It also checks for correct answers, keeping players on track.

Another unique feature to Mathdoku.com is that instead of just offering up one puzzle a day, like you would get if you were playing the puzzle in an off line newspaper or something, you get a randomly generated puzzle selected from one of the many they have available.

There is even a no holds barred special op puzzle, called a no- op that hides the math to make it tougher for the player. As to the owners of the site, while they think Sudoku has already hit it’s peak of sorts with popularity, Kendoku’s future looks quite bright. The websites traffic did a pretty big spike in fact, up to 28,000 visitors when the New York Times started featuring a KenKen puzzle on it’s puzzle page.

So, while Mathdoku.com was born of love and romance, it is sustaining itself with solid growth and numbers, and is the next big thing in online puzzles and gaming. Ready to drop by and test your brain skills?

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Starting out in the world of Sudoku can be extremely hard if you don’t know what you are doing. Your best bet is to read up on the rules and get some beginning Sudoku strategies to make sure you can get started on the right foot.

If you don’t already know, the goal for a Sudoku puzzle is to make sure that every row, column, and box each contain every number 1 through 9. Because each of these items can only have a number once, this lets you use logic to determine which number goes in which square. This is really the ground level of problem solving in Sudoku. If a box has every number except for 2, then that is the obvious answer. This same concept applies to the rows and columns as well.

While this is the basic idea of Sudoku, you should also realize that the puzzles are hardly ever going to be that simple. You will need to combine the information that is available in the rows, columns, and boxes to actually complete a Sudoku board. When you start being able to do this, you really open up yourself to much more in-depth and effective strategies.

Probably the most widely used strategy is one that deals choosing a box and seeing what the surrounding rows contain. Looking at your box you will notice that it has 3 rows and 3 columns that run into it. As another example let’s assume that two of these rows have the number 5 in them. You know then for that box the number 5 can only be in the remaining row, which only has 3 squares. Hopefully two of those squares have already been filled and you can then put the 5 in the last one. If not, then you can move on and come back to that area once you have completed more of the puzzle.

Another strategy is to pick a row or column and see which numbers it is missing. For this example lets assume that our row is missing the numbers, 1,2, and 3. We know that they all go into it, but not exactly where. Look at the columns that run into the three empty spaces of your row. Let’s say you find a 2 in the left column and another 2 in the right column. The fact that they already contain 2’s means that there are no more 2’s needed for those columns, which includes two of your empty spaces in your original row. That leaves only one possible space in that row, which you can now fill with a 2.

In the end Sudoku really comes down to eliminating incorrect answers through logic. The information you need is already available and it is up to you to interpret it correctly. A lot of it can end up being simple trial and error, but you’ll be much more successful if you start off using these beginning Sudoku strategies.

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Sudoku has gained extreme popularity in recent years. The game has found favor because it can be designed for many different skill levels and comes in so many different formats. You can find easy puzzles, hard puzzles, paper puzzles, or electronic puzzles. Sudoku is one game that will likely never go out of style.

It’s interesting to examine the history of Sudoku and what is now a worldwide phenomenon.

No one is quite sure about its exact origins. The closest puzzles can actually be traced back to some French newspapers from the 1800’s. Even so, they were not exactly like the puzzles we have today.

Experts speculate that it was a man named Howard Garns who developed Sudoku, though it was called “Number Place” at that time. He had his work published by Dell Magazines in the 1970’s and 1980’s.

As we now know, the game ended up with a Japanese name. The idea was transferred to a Japanese newspaper in the early 1980’s and was called Suugi wa dokushin ni kagiru. It was later shortened to “Sudoku”.

It had some relative success, but largely flew under the radar at that time. It wasn’t until the year 2005 when it really took off. British and United States newspapers both began to publish Sudoku games in their editions. Many others soon followed suit.

The reason for its popularity is simple.

It can take a little while to get used to playing Sudoku, but once you understand the rules, you’ll be able to play with no problem. Of course, some of the more advanced puzzles can be quite challenging and take hours If not days to solve.

The puzzle has a total of 81 tiny squares going 9 down and 9 across. There are smaller sections of boxes going 3 down and 3 across. It is your mission to fill these 3X3 areas with the numbers 1-9 with each number appearing at least once and only once in each row or column. That means for example, that the number “8″ couldn’t be in the same row or more than once.

A Sudoku puzzle will be partially filled out when you receive it. You will have to consider what numbers are already there and which ones are left. The easiest puzzles might seem like a breeze to complete, but the more challenging ones could take you days!

The Sudoku phenomenon doesn’t show any signs of slowing down either.

As previously mentioned, Sudoku puzzles can be found in newspapers worldwide. There are even entire magazines devoted to these puzzles.

If you’d rather play electronically, that is an option as well. There are handheld versions as well as versions made to go along with several popular gaming consoles.

Of course, there are even Websites where you can play Sudoku online. Doing a simple Google search turns up sites like WebSudoku.com and Bin-Co.com, which are both great online destinations for playing a game of Sudoku. That means you can have Sudoku with you wherever you go!

Sudoku has a long and fascinating history, spanning different decades and countries and Its popularity shows no sings of waning as more people become addicted to this deceptively simple game!

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