Another Syndicate Offers 'Sudoku' Puzzles

By: E&P Staff King Features Syndicate has joined the list of distributors launching "Sudoku" puzzles during the past year.

Among them are the self-syndicated Wayne Gould (who started last fall), Universal Press Syndicate (this spring), and Tribune Media Services (this summer).

King's new entry is "Conceptis Sudoku" by Dave Green, president of Conceptis Ltd., an Israel-based company that supplies more than 6,000 puzzles a year to magazines, books, and mobile-content suppliers in 25 countries. The daily "Conceptis Sudoku" gets harder as the week goes on, with Monday's the easiest and Sunday's the hardest.

"Sudoku" is a crossword-like puzzle that uses numbers instead of words. It features 81 squares, divided into boxes of nine squares apiece. Some squares contain numbers, and the goal is to fill the empty squares so that every row, every column, and every box contains the digits 1 through 9.