Celebrate 200 issues of Handy Sudoku!
This month we are celebrating a mind-boggling milestone: 200 issues of Handy Sudoku! One of our most popular titles, Handy Sudoku is the best fun with numbers you can have. Though it might look tricky at first glance, Sudoku puzzles require logical thinking, not maths skills – everyone has it in them to conquer the challenge. Read on to learn a little more about the history of this great number puzzle!
Did you know the earliest incarnation of Sudoku was created by a Swiss mathematician called Leonhard Euler in 1783? Dubbed “Latin Squares”, Euler came up with the idea for a grid in which every number or symbol would appear only once in each row or column. Fast-forward to 1970s New York, Dell Puzzle Magazines created a version of Latin Squares with the grid divided into blocks of nine, which they called “Number Place”.
The Sudoku puzzles we recognise now began to gain widespread popularity in 1986 when they were first published by Japanese puzzle company Nikoli. Sudoku eventually caught the eye of The Times in Britain, who launched their own versions in November 2004, and since then the delightfully tricky number puzzle has become a global phenomenon. There’s even a World Sudoku Championship, held annually and organised by the World Puzzle Federation.
