Halx

Su doku. Admit it. You do it too.

I told myself I was over it, but my sister got me a book for christmas and now I am sitting here messing with another puzzle.

It used to give me a sense of being clever, before i realized everyone and their brother plays this game. Now I just play it to grind out the time.

I think its funny that there are so many books out there. Go to Barnes and Noble, look at the games section. There is an entire section just for Su Doku. Its boggling to me because there is a finite number of possible puzzles. I'm sure they are created randomly and only a few are tested. I've run across puzzles labeled "medium difficulty" that would be impossible to solve without assuming. In otherwords, there is no craft to su doku, its all just craze.

And I'm wrapped up in it.

And I know you are too.

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maleficent

i got an electronic suduko for christmas and i dont get it...

i've seen the puzzles in the paper - and id on't get the charm of them... there's supposed to be fun?

give me a good old fashioned crossword puzzle...

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Daniel_

Every one can be solved, but I often find in the hardest puzzles that you get to a point where there are four squares left that are all interdependent (four cells at the corners of a rectangle on the board, each can be one of 2 numbers).

Then it's tossing a coin territory.

When I get to that stage, I call it a solved puzzle - it's not my fault that the setter fucked up.

If you need help, go here: http://www.matriciel.co.uk/sudoku/

If you find they are too easy, try Super Sodoku - it's a 4x4x4 grid, in HEX (base 16).

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The Echo of a distant time
Comes willowing across the sand;
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Craven Morehead

FYI - neither I not my brother play it

spectre

C'mon mal. They're fun. Grab a Red Eye in the morning and do the Sudoku and Crossword on your EL ride. That's what I do. (God knows I don't grab the Red Eye for the journalism )

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snowy

I'm with mal. I prefer crossword puzzles, because they call on my knowledge of trivia and words, which is more interesting to me.

I really dislike sudoku because I had to do a lot of logic work as a kid as part of talented and gifted, to the point that I can't stand it now. Ugh. One look at a sudoku puzzle and I'm back in 4th grade. No thanks.

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MexicanOnABike

ha. i like them. websudoku.com was the 1st real place i learned and those are fun.
the books sold here are really dumb tho. simple is often harder than REaLLy hard.

i havent done one with guessing yet. theres always a way of figuring it out without a guess or thats would be cheating.

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oberon

Another websudoku.com fan here. I dislike wasting paper on a game like that and the web version is "free" too. I play it to waste time and sharpen my logic skills, nothing more. In my business, logic is king. I don't think sudoku is really that big of a deal, honestly.

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micah67

I was (hooked|addicted) for a while. I have a pocketpc phone that I downloaded a freeware application that generates pretty decent puzzles. Using that game I was able to learn a lot of strategy. Hidden triplets and x-wing are as difficult as it gets, though.

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Cynthetiq

i tried. i didn't find it fun so i stopped. skogafoss played it also for awhile, but also stopped.

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Willy

I don't play it but my brother does!

Carno

Meh. I never liked sudoku. It's just really fucking boring to me.

analog

When it first became really popular, I kept telling people it was called "seppuku", not "sudoku", with the hope that they would then go and ask people if they had the "seppuku" game.

To save some of you the google, "seppuku" is an old Japanese ritual suicide by disembowelment, one use of which was a part of the code of the samurai warriors.

So basically, I wanted people to go asking at a book store for the game of ritual suicide by disembowelment.

I always thought I should get extra bonus points for the irony that seppuku was often committed to offset shame... like the embarrassment of asking for a Seppuku game.

little_tippler

I can still remember sitting on a flight and noticing that all these people on the plane had these little booklets they were very concentrated on. I asked my boyfriend if he knew what it was they were all raving about and he told me it was this "new" game called sudoku. I thought, well it must be good, because people seem so excited about it. This was the first time I realized it was this popular new thing. Then I decided to find out what it was exactly. When I saw what it was, I couldn't believe that was it. People are raving about a simple logic game with little squares and numbers? Huh? I was completely baffled.

It's a bit like my reaction after reading the first Harry Potter book - " Huh? I've read something so similar to this before it could almost be called plagiarism and the writing is pretty average, if not below average." I never read another.

To this day I think I have only tried to play it maybe 10 times. It bores me and it doesn't feel challenging, because though the difficulty may increase, it's always the same thing in the end. BIIIIIG YAWN. Recently though I have found myself missing maths. A lot of people I know don't like maths much so when I tell them I miss knowing how to do certain things that used to be easy, people look at me funny. But sudoku is definitely not enough to get me excited - at all.

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Paq

constantly play it. heck, i play the version on 'brain age' on the DS every night before bed. I've become a zen master at sudoku...

but some puzzles just kick my butt. it is pretty addictive, though, and i don't nkow why...then again, brain age as a game is pretty addictive, even though you're just doing math problems or counting syllables or trying to say the color of a word when the name is different, ( a blue word that says red..harder than it sounds to say blue when you see that)

i am just glad there is a turning point towards intellectualism again..unlike the embracing of stupidity over the past 5 yrs (...it says chicken of the sea...so is it a fish or chicken)...

geebus.

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Charlatan

No sir, I don't like.

I'd rather read a book on my commute.

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maleficent

the red eye is fine journalism

but the crossword in the red eye is about as stimulating as the crossword in the tv guide I can finish it in less time than it takes for me to reach my stop (which is only about 20 minutes )

I was a math major in college, I should technically love sudukos - but Ive just gotten stupid... my brain has entirey to much trivia in it.

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Bill O'Rights

Yup...don't like 'em.
Gimme a good old fashioned crossword, or even a word search, any day.
But, then again, I'm a poor guage. I'm mathematically challenged.

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mixedmedia

I'm with mal and snowy...I've no interest in soduku...sodoku...soduko....whatever the hell it is.

But I am addicted to crossword puzzles I have books going all the time...I'm doing a book of Random House medium-difficulty right now (just challenging enough not to be boring), but I also have a book of NY Times Sunday Crossword puzzles...of which I have actually finished ONE, lol. They're so friggin' hard, man! But I love trying to figure them out.

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Glory's Sun

I've never even tried one. They just look boring to me. Of course alot of that has to do with the fact that I abhor math in all forms.

shesus

As much as I love math, I never got into soduko. However, I love those division problems that use letters to represent the numbers. But they don't make a book of those.

I like the point and solve crossword puzzles, but have only found one book like that. So I waste my time away with the variety puzzles. One type of puzzle makes me bored, I need the variety of Acrostics, Cryptograms, and such.

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maleficent

I've been doing ny times crossword puzzles for more than 20 years - i think i can count on 2 hands the number of sunday puzzles i've finished - Monday, tuesday and wednesday are pretty easy - thursday friday and saturday make me feel like amental midgit

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Daniel_

All of you that like Cross Words and Mathematics should try Kakuro (http://www.kakuro.com/).

It's not pure logic, there is arithmetic in it too. And it's like a cross word.

__________________

╔═════════════════════════════════════════╗
Overhead, the Albatross hangs motionless upon the air,
And deep beneath the rolling waves,
In labyrinths of Coral Caves,
The Echo of a distant time
Comes willowing across the sand;
And everthing is Green and Submarine
╚═════════════════════════════════════════╝

mixedmedia

Yes, their crossword puzzle team must be made up of sadists with cosmic IQs bent on dashing our illusions of our own mental prowess, lol. And that Will Shortz? Their maniacal nerdmaster, er, I mean wordmaster.

But seriously, I like the Sunday ones best because of their size. I prefer larger puzzles to smaller ones for some reason.

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Pip

I was addicted to sudokus for quite a while and still do one every now and then. I love "sorting" games like that, there are a bunch of skill-based solitare games that I play all the freaking time in periods. I suck at Rubik's Cube though.

Sudoku fans, do you like solitare and "puzzle" games as well?

Carno

No way dude. I highly doubt that playing sudoku makes you think more or makes you smarter.

Sudoku is just some stupid knick knack game that anyone can do. The fact that one may be good at sudoku is only because one practices it. I am relatively good at doing a rubik's cube, but I'm still as dumb as I always have been. It hasn't made me "smarter" or more "intellectual".

Wilkerson

Sudoku! I love it. I first became addicted to them in one of those monthly puzzle books. Now it was immediately apparent the nature of the illness, then one day the book arrived and rapidly my eyes searched the index and then there was the page laying there ready to be attacked.

In the early days of filling those numbers in; there would be trouble for me. Then I learned the basic tricks for working through all of them and these days, a dozen puzzles can be completed nearly blindfolded in a fairly short stretch of time. Since I do all puzzles in black ink pen, there's no room for error. They are quite enjoyable and make me think as to where the numbers are to go...definitely a good brain warmer in the early morning.

moot1337

depends on if you buy chicken of the sea brand tuna or chicken of the sea brand canned chicken!!! wahahaha!

At any rate, I didn't like sudoku all that much when I played it.... so many better things to do :P

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Ourcrazymodern?

I waste A LOT OF TIME on sudoku. It's distracting and sometimes I need that. Of course, sudoku came before the tilted forum, and might now fade into the past...except more sudoku books and one of the electronic versions comprized most of my Xmas presents.
I love crosswords as well, but one advantage sudoku has over those is that you don't necessarily remember a game, having played it.

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guthmund

No doubt...

"Billy got his animal at the pet store and not the pound where the pet with the green collar was adopted."

ARGHH!!!

I tried to get into it because everyone at work was into it, but a few puzzles in and it started to feel like work. I prefer the crosswords, but just about anything else will do, even a word search will do in a pinch.

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Intense1

Ok, I am a bit intrigued by it - but I can't figure out how do do it. I start with writing (in pencil, of course) outside each outside block what it could be, but is there a system involved? I'm not good with numbers, so am I missing something? I am more and more getting enticed by it, so I need to know if anyone has figured out how to do it!!!!! Help!!!

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DaElf

I got a 500 page crossword puzzle book I don't know what so doku is.

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xepherys

But that's why solving BOTH, crosswords and sudoku, is best. You exercise a larger portion of your brain that way.

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snowy

Trust me...through the years, that portion of my brain has had more than enough exercise. It needs the rest.

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Gilda

There is good research to indicate that mental exercises, like doing word, logic, visual manipulation, or math puzzles, make you smarter and increase how quickly you think. Sudoku is a classic example of a pure logic puzzle (It isn't strictly speaking, a math puzzle; it's a logic puzzle that uses numbers as symbols. Any group of nine unique symbols will work). I can muddle through the easier ones, but for my logic puzzle fix I usually go with minesweeper. Like others here, I like crosswords and other word puzzles, though I'm strictly a medium level player there as well.

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uncle phil

i've been doing the NY Times crosswords for, like, forever, and i have no idea what this soduku thing is...

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Kadath

I think taking pride in not participating in (or knowing about) a broad social trend is pretty funny. You either enjoy it or you don't. No need to look down on those who enjoy something, even if you consider it simplistic or boring.

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Ourcrazymodern?

The only system involved that I know of is figuring out what can't go where so it has to go there, and I know that's not cohesive. I find the 3x's fairly doable, these days, but the 4x's have too much to keep track of for me. You don't have to be good with numbers to do sudoku as there is no math involved. One could just as well use smileys, but that'd make it more difficult for me
It's interesting, isn't it, that these puzzles require no translation?
There was an "article" in the Onion a couple months ago that had a picture of a guy on a bus doing a crossword, entitled "...doing some sort of weird alphabet-based sudoku." I got a kick out of that.

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Sharon

A friend of mine is useless at Sudoku with numbers, but can solve a grid with letter substitutes extremely quickly. Very strange.

I never got into Sudoku myself. I prefer cool logic puzzles, the ones that are like "There are three men standing in a row. The first one can see the second one but not the first..." etc

mixedmedia

For all the crossword lovers on this thread, I was given a great gift this past weekend...

Naughty Crosswords by the creators of Nerve.com

As I told the giver of this exquisitely appropriate gift, I love it when my diverse interests can converge so completely!

...and they are actually more challenging than I expected.

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Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce