There’s a new Everest for the Sudoku fanatics out there. It’s called Kakuro, and it’s driving me crazy.

My fascination with puzzles began with crossword puzzles. I never know enough words to finish the puzzle and the insistence of ancient pop culture references frustrates me. It’s as if the older generations want to feel better about themselves because they can recall the co-star from ‘Mogambo.’

My irrational hatred of crossword puzzles made me give up the valuable logical skills that puzzles can develop. Then one day, wedged between Dilbert and Get Fuzzy, Sudoku appeared.

Sudoku, a freakishly addictive puzzle in which every row, column and square in a nine-by-nine grid must contain the numbers one through nine, entered the mainstream. I gave it a shot and promptly began to fail. An ‘easy’ puzzle resulted in 2 hours of erasing until the newsprint had been entirely wiped off the page. I bought a new copy of the paper and proceeded to fail again. After a few weeks my room was covered in newspaper scraps, and all of the sections that didn’t contain my favorite headache gathered in a corner, unread. For someone essentially living under a rock, I had plenty of news.

Finally, I started to get it. I bought a few books of puzzles to save some trees (including the self esteem-crushing ‘Sudoku for Dummies’), and I slowly developed a solving method. It was a ton of work for the feeling of completing a puzzle, but it was worth it.

And for a while, I was happy.

Sudoku was making its manufacturers very rich, and as always happens in our capitalist society, they began looking for the next great puzzle. They found Kakuro.

Kakuro is no new discovery; it has been available under the name ‘Cross Sums’ for years. But in response to Sudoku’s popularity, it donned a cool, new Japanese name and quickly became a bestseller.

I fell for the scam and bought a Kakuro book. I was expecting a simple new twist on Sudoku, like a 16 by 16 square, or perhaps a circular grid. Instead, I got another headache.

Kakuro is supposed to be Sudoku with addition involved, and it does feel vaguely familiar. A number still can’t be repeated in the same row or column and the only legal numbers are one through nine. Unlike Sudoku, the numbers in a row or column must add up to match the number at the beginning. Confused yet?

In Sudoku, the numbers one through nine fill a column. But in Kakuro, a group of three spaces with a sum of 20 could be 3-8-9, 4-7-9, 5-6-9 or 5-7-8. The right combination of digits doesn’t help much because its order depends entirely on the rows that cross it.

Despite the complexity of any Kakuro description, it is still easier said than done. I’ve been working on Kakuro puzzles for three months now, constantly starting and restarting. I had to look at the answer for the only one I ever finished (outside of my Kakuro Jr. book, that is.) It was just for one number, but it still wasn’t a victory.

If I had any advice, I’d say stay away. Kakuro is Sudoku on crack and I am addicted. It’s no good for me, and unlike with Sudoku, I’m not getting any better. I can’t even return to Sudoku now because it doesn’t provide an adequate challenge. I’m stuck in puzzle hell.

It’s hard to remember when doing these made me feel smart.

Eric Meyers is a freshman newspaper major. You can e-mail him at esmeyers@syr.edu or post your comments at dailyorangeblog.com.

Published on September 10, 2006 at 12:00 pm