What's the next Sudoku? Now there's a puzzle

All puzzles have answers.

Some are easy to figure out, like the clues in a newspaper's Monday crossword, a beginner's Sudoku grid or cryptogram. Others are more difficult.

But one puzzle that has proved impossible to solve, even by the best in the business, is this: What's the Next Big Thing in puzzles?

Which is to say, the next Sudoku, the next logic, number or word craze to rock the world, muscle its way into magazines and newspapers or drive publishers to delirium printing collections for the new game's fans.

"We'd all like to know what the next big thing is because it would be a jump on the competition if you're the first one to come out with it," said Wayne Schmittberger, editor-in-chief of Games magazine.

The last Next Big Thing

The last big thing, Sudoku, became wildly popular in 2005 and now appears in hundreds of newspapers, including The Seattle Times. It was marketed by a New Zealander named Wayne Gould who developed a computer program to generate the puzzle grid and numbers.

Gould persuaded the Times of London to run the puzzle in 2004, and later that year the Los Angeles Times. After that it was like watching a row of dominoes fall as word of the puzzle spread around the world and people bent their heads in solemn contemplation of the numbers 1 through 9.

But Sudoku was actually invented by someone in the United States and first published in the late 1970s by Dell Pencil Puzzles under a different name, Numbers Place; people responded with a collective yawn.

Gould found a collection of the number puzzles in Japan in the late 1990s — where it was called Sudoku — wrote the computer program, then made the puzzle available to newspapers for free as long as they publicized his Web site.

It didn't have to be translated into another language, and the rules were short and simple. Suddenly there was a puzzle craze.

It only took 25 years.

Unpredictable crazes

Newspapers have long been home to puzzles of every kind, beginning with crosswords in the 1920s. A storm of creativity and innovation followed, leading to jumbles, cryptograms, acrostics and many others.

As new games made their way to the fore, papers either expanded the space available (The London Daily Mail, for example, runs four pages of puzzles every day in a section called "Coffee Break") or changed what they ran in favor of the latest "craze."

But finding the next craze is a bit like catching lightning in a bottle.

"It's very likely there is no next big thing," said Will Shortz, the crossword-puzzle editor of The New York Times, which runs Sundays in The Seattle Times. "That's because crazes only come along once in a blue moon, and when they do come, they come as a surprise."

Publishers have tried different puzzles, some of which have proved popular in Japan, said Schmittberger, such as the logic games Battleship, Paint-by-Numbers and Kakuro. But nothing has struck a chord with people.

"It's too early to really say that any of those things will be really big," he said. "At this point, I don't see any real clear winner."

Plenty of puzzles

The winner may simply be those who do puzzles, according to Dave Green, founder of Conceptispuzzles.com, which claims to have 10 million of its puzzles printed each day in 40 countries.

"Logic puzzles are a consumable good," he said. "Each puzzle is different, once you solve them, you go onto the next."

In Battleship, a solitary version of the board game, the goal remains the same: Find the fleet of ships on the grid. Numbers on the bottom and side of the grid clue the player as to how many segments of a ship can be found in that row or column; a submarine fills one square, a battleship four squares. Players are spotted a few squares to get started. The puzzle is also known as Yubotu, which is Japanese for submarine.

Paint-by-Numbers also employs a grid with numbers on the side and top, but here players are calculating what squares to color in, and the end result is a picture.

The most Sudokulike puzzle, Kakuro, traveled the same route as its cousin, first appearing in Dell magazines in the mid-1960s and later turning up in Japan with a new name. It, too, requires players to fill a grid with numbers 1 through 9, but the sum of each horizontal block must equal the clue on its left, and the sum of each vertical block must equal the clue on its top.

In short, it's a math game that enthralls some players and leaves others cold.

"We've got one magazine out there (of Kakuro puzzles), and it's selling OK," said Christine Begley, associate publisher of Penny Publications, Penny Press and Dell Magazine, "but it's not selling like Sudoku. I think Kakuro is harder, which isn't going to attract as many people."

Her favorite puzzle, Sum-Doku, combines elements of Sudoku and Kakuro. The regular rules of Sudoku apply, however. "Each puzzle contains a number of areas surrounded by dotted lines, each one with a small number in the upper left corner. The digits entered in each of these areas must add up to the number in the corner, and all the digits in each of the areas must be different," according to the Dell instructions.

"I love it," she said. "I'm totally addicted. It's perfect for those who have really enjoyed Sudoku and are looking for something new to challenge them."

All four puzzles can be found in games magazines and online, but none has replaced the standard fare found in newspapers or generated the publishing interest of other games (Amazon lists 420 books for Sudoku puzzles and one for Yubotu).

The next big little things?

Part of what makes it difficult for any new puzzle to establish a foothold in magazines or newspapers is the limited space those venues have for such features. (All those willing to give up your jumble, cryptogram or crossword for the Next Big Thing, raise your hand.)

"It's a continuing issue," said Merl Reagle, who creates crossword puzzles for the San Francisco Chronicle that also appear in The Seattle Times. "If I ran a newspaper, I'd have an entire page of puzzles, but that's just me."

He believes that if there were some great, addictive puzzle out there just waiting to be found, it'd be known by now.

"We are so connected by the Internet and through 400 TV channels that if there are any puzzles out there that haven't been discovered, it isn't out there," said Reagle. "Once someone thinks of a puzzle easy to do and easy to explain, we're going to find it. It isn't out there, or they must be harder to find than we thought."

In the end, the Next Big Thing may not be just one thing, but a lot of little things, said Shortz, who sees in the current generation of puzzles a history like that of crosswords.

"The same thing is happening with Sudoku," he said. "There are hundreds of new varieties that are flowing into the marketplace, and that may be the biggest legacy of Sudoku."