Sudoku Puzzles, which are also popularly known as the Number Place, was originally a game puzzle published for a newspaper in France. The year 1895 saw the birth of the said puzzle game. The Number Place puzzle was subsequently revived during the mid-80s in Japan and was later known as the Sudoku Puzzles. It started to gain its popularity among the international community during 2005.



During the revival of what was originally the Number Place puzzle in Japan, publishers abbreviated the phrase “suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru”, which literally meant “the digits must remain single”, and came up with the more popular name, Sudoku Puzzles.

The Sudoku Puzzles, unlike others, have a very easy instruction to follow. Although numbers have been conventionally used as the symbol or character for the puzzle, some of its variations substitute the numbers with letters, geometric figures, and others. Another version of the puzzle even used the positions in a baseball game to replace the numbers between one and nine. The characters used are actually irrelevant to the objective of the game itself.

The logic of the Sudoku puzzles is very simple. A grid with a dimension that is usually 3x3, the region, is found inside an outer grid with a consequent dimension of usually 9x9. All in all therefore, a total of 81 mini squares could be found. Some of these mini squares are marked by a certain character. Take for example, any number between 1 – 9. These characters are what they call the givens. The objective of the game is to place the numbers within the specified range. Also, these numbers must be placed in all the remaining blocks. The difficult part now rests on the task of making sure that horizontally, vertically, and regionally, there is no repetition of any of the numbers within the specified range.

The said puzzle games then became known as a type of game that would stimulate a person's logical reasoning, as well as other mental faculties. Some teachers even suggest this game to be able to stimulate and exercise the said cognitive function. Although it seems simple enough to solve, solving an entire puzzle would require complex mental functions. The mental functions needed will depend on the complexity of the given Sudoku Puzzles.

Some puzzles for the novice solvers come as big as a 25x25 grid. This would mean that there would be a total of 625 characters that need to be placed in an order that would satisfy the conditions of the puzzle. However, Sudoku Puzzles also cater to young people who are delighted by finding solutions to problems. A 4x4 version of the puzzle is available for kids to practice on.

Newspapers in the 1800s were good enough to supply their audience with a daily dose of the Sudoku Puzzles. This allowed for the puzzle to gain great popularity among fans of brain-twisters. It actually became as regular, during that time, as the more common crossword puzzle of our current daily newspaper.

Sudoku Puzzles have been part of this civilization. It is safe to conclude that it will definitely continue to do so. As long as people want to exercise their logical and deductive reasoning, it will continue to be published and supplied by fans and enthusiasts. This is especially true now that computer programs allow for game developers to the increase the dimensions of given Sudoku Puzzles. There is virtually an indefinite limit to how difficult one of these puzzles could get.