History & culture
Where Sudoku came from, how it spread, and the people who shaped how the puzzle is solved today — Maki Kaji, Howard Garns, the variants tree.
A short history of Sudoku X
Where Sudoku X (Diagonal Sudoku) came from, how it spread alongside the 2005 Sudoku boom, and what its quietly steady following looks like today.
4 min read
A short history of Windoku
Where Windoku (the original Dutch name for Hyper Sudoku) came from, how it spread, and why it's quietly maintained a thirty-year following in puzzle publishing.
5 min read
Puzzle magazines of Japan
Sudoku is the famous one. The wider Japanese pencil-puzzle ecosystem produced dozens of others, and most of them haven't travelled. A small tour.
8 min read
The back-page revival, 2004 to 2006
How Sudoku ate the newspaper back page in eighteen months, and what was happening in print journalism that made it possible.
7 min read
Why the Japanese name stuck
Sudoku is American by invention but Japanese by name — how the branding survived the global takeover, and what it tells you about how puzzles travel.
6 min read
Who actually invented Sudoku
The honest story of how Sudoku came to be — Howard Garns in Indianapolis, Maki Kaji in Tokyo, Wayne Gould in Hong Kong, and the path from each to every newspaper's back page.
6 min read