TMS Will Syndicate 'Sudoku' Puzzles

By: E&P Staff Two major growth areas in syndication this year are poker columns and "Sudoku" puzzles.

Starting this Monday, Tribune Media Services will become at least the third major "Sudoku" distributor. TMS follows the self-syndicated Wayne Gould (who began doing the puzzles for newspapers last fall) and Universal Press Syndicate (which announced in May that it was offering "Sudoku" puzzles by David Bodycombe).

TMS will syndicate "Sudoku" puzzles by Michael Mepham, who has been doing a version of the grid-based logic game for the Los Angeles Times. The feature will be daily, and increase in difficulty as the week goes on. Mepham has produced several books of "Sudoku" puzzles, including those that appeared in The Daily Telegraph of London.

"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.