SuDoku is the hottest game on the planet.

Now you can play SuDoku anywhere you go — without paper or pencil. The New York Times® Touch Screen SuDoku Handheld has all the features that even the most demanding puzzler will appreciate, and with 835 brilliant puzzles selected by the renowned New York Times® columnist Will Shortz, you’ll have countless hours of fun. With timers, hints, and four selectable levels of difficulty, this SuDoku game is the most user-friendly unit ever made, and you can save any game to finish playing later.

• Solve a square or even the whole puzzle with a touch of the stylus
• Automatically time your game so you can compete with friends
• Auto-save function allows you to conserve batteries by shutting off the unit when it's not being used — and saves your work so that you can complete the game later

The New York Times® Touch Screen SuDoku Handheld is suitable for ages 8 and up and requires 2 AAA batteries (not included).



Rules and terminology

The New York Times® Touch Screen SuDoku Handheld puzzle uses 9x9 grid made up of 3x3 subgrids (called "regions"). Some cells already contain numbers, known as "givens". The goal is to fill in the empty cells, one number in each, so that each column, row, and region contains the numbers 1 through 9 exactly once. Each number in the solution therefore occurs only once in each of three "directions", hence the "single numbers" implied by the puzzle's name.

The attraction of the puzzle is that the completion rules are simple, yet the line of reasoning required to reach the completion may be difficult. Sudoku is recommended by some teachers as an exercise in logical reasoning. The level of difficulty of the puzzles can be selected to suit the class or individual user.

A brief history of SuDoku

According to Will Shortz, the modern SuDoku was most likely designed anonymously by Howard Garns, a 74-year-old retired architect and freelance puzzle constructor. The game was first published in New York in the late 1970s and was introduced in Japan in April 1984 as Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru, which can be translated as "the numbers must be single" or "the numbers must occur only once”. At a later date, the name was abbreviated to SuDoku (pronounced SUE-dough-coo; su = number, doku = single). In 1986 two innovations were introduced which guaranteed the popularity of the puzzle; the number of givens was restricted to no more than 30 and puzzles became "symmetrical" (meaning the givens were distributed in rotationally symmetric cells). Since that time it has become a world-wide phenomenon.