The key to solving kakuro puzzles is to be familiar with ‘kakuro blocks’ – a list of special number clues. These are blocks of a given size and sum that only have a solution in terms of a single choice of digits. For example, the sum of 16 on a block of length two can only be made with the digits 7 and 9.

How to Solve KenKen® Puzzles

1. Fill in each square cell in the puzzle with a number between 1 and the size of the grid.
2. Use each number exactly once in each row and each column.
3. The numbers in each “Cage” (indicated by the heavy lines) must combine — in any order — to produce the cage’s target number using the indicated math operation.

KenKen and KenDoku are trademarked names for a style of arithmetic and logic puzzle invented in 2004 by Japanese math teacher Tetsuya Miyamoto, who intended the puzzles to be an instruction-free method of training the brain. The name derives from the Japanese word for cleverness (賢, ken, kashiko(i)).

The task in Kakuro puzzles is to fill all empty squares using numbers 1 to 9 so the sum of each horizontal block equals the clue on its left, and the sum of each vertical block equals the clue on its top. In addition, no number may be used in the same block more than once.

kakuro is much harder than sudoku.

The traditional way to solve a Kakuro puzzle is incremental: by using the existing information on the board, you can find with certainty the value of a specific cell which can take only one possible value. Then that value is filled and the process is repeated until all the board cells have been discovered.

It is that lack of duplication that makes creating Kakuro puzzles with unique solutions possible. There is an unwritten rule for making Kakuro puzzles that each clue must have at least two numbers that add up to it, since including only one number is mathematically trivial when solving Kakuro puzzles.

Holey Kakuro The object is to fill all empty squares using numbers 1 to 9 so the sum of each horizontal block equals the clue on its left, and the sum of each vertical block equals the clue on its top. In addition, no number may be used in the same block more than once.

Jacob E. Funk

You’ve probably seen tons of rebus puzzles before, but had no idea what they were called. Rebus puzzles are picture-based riddles that usually have answers that have to do with common expressions or idioms.

Syllogisms. One of the simplest types of logical puzzles is a syllogism. In this type of puzzle, you are given a set of statements, and you are required to determine some truth from those statements. These types of puzzles can often be solved by applying principles from propositional logic and predicate logic.

There are different genres of puzzles, such as crossword puzzles, word-search puzzles, number puzzles, relational puzzles, and logic puzzles. Puzzles are often created to be a form of entertainment but they can also arise from serious mathematical or logical problems.

ANAG

An anagram is a word or phrase which is created by rearranging the existing letters into another word/phrase. It is important to understand that the word or phrase created from an anagram must have legitimate meaning, as opposed to merely being gibberish.

Cheap (anag.) ( 5) An anagram clue in a cryptic crossword is rather more sophisticated than this, and will normally consist of three parts: a definition; the letters to be rearranged (sometimes referred to by crossword fans as the ‘anagram fodder’); and an indication that the letters are to be rearranged.