Family Fun – Logic Puzzles

Tonight we played a game called SUDOKU. It is a puzzle that usually comes as a 9×9 grid and within that are 3×3 grids called “regions”. Certain squares already have numbers in them. The objective is to fill all the empty squares with one number in each, so that each column, row, and region contains the numbers 1 to 9 only once.

We printed off a copy of one of the puzzles in the book for each family member. To our 8-year-old girl we gave a simpler puzzle. The rest of us had the same puzzle. My son wanted to be sure we didn’t have it too easy so he turned halfway through the book to find one. It seemed so easy at first but THEN when you thought you had it licked and was down to the last row you realized you had messed up and had to go back and try to find where you had went wrong.

The other problem was that we had not thoroughly read the directions. My oldest son figured he had the gist of it. After 30 minutes into it ZJ thought he would see if the book had any tips that just might help us and lo, and behold it did. What a novel idea to actually read the directions! It’s a guy thing, I know. For some reason they don’t like to be bothered by such mundane matters.

Well SM figured the puzzle out first, about an hour later. Good for him.

A challenging game, but quite fun. Give it a try, but please don’t start in the middle of the book.