INDEPENDENT NEWS

Solving the Mother’s Day Puzzle

Published: Thu 11 May 2006 03:20 PM
Media release
11 May 2006
For Immediate Release
Solving the Mother’s Day Puzzle
Chocolates? Flowers? Talcum powder? Forget them.
If you’re struggling for a Mother’s Day gift solution, New Zealand’s Toy Man, Sunil Dahya says you need look no further than the Rubik’s Cube manufacturers’ latest innovation: a portable Sudoku board that lets players solve puzzles using colours as well as numbers.
Mr Dahya who is managing director of Elephanta Marketing, New Zealand’s sole Rubik’s licensee,says, “The Rubik’s Sudoku is set to be the new craze to sweep the country. It’s every bit as mind-bendingly logical and as wickedly fiendish as both Rubik’s Cube and the paper version of Sudoku.”
Rubik’s Sudoku is in a plastic hand-held grid in which 81 tiles are arranged conventionally in nine boxes; each containing nine tiles in three-by-three format. The puzzle is completed by placing any one of nine different coloured tiles, rather than a number, in each of the squares.
As well as the coloured squares, this game also provides smaller coloured pegs. These are designed for players to use to keep a note when they want to record that a particular colour tile may go in a square. It the player is not sure if it’s say, yellow or red in that square, they can mark it with both coloured pegs until they make up their mind.
“Because the pieces are easily movable, there’s no more scribbling out wrong moves,” Mr Dahya says. “Paper puzzles can be easily transferred to the grid which comes with a booklet containing 100 starter games along with tips and techniques.”
While it is estimated there are nearly 5.5 billion unique combinations of colours or numbers on the Sudoku grid, Mr Dahya says you don’t have to be a mathematician to enjoy paying it.
“The attraction of the puzzle is that the rules are simple, yet the line of reasoning required to reach the solution may be complex. Sudoku is recommended by some teachers as an exercise in logical reasoning. And as the level of difficulty of the puzzles varies, people start out with ‘gentle’ games and work up to hard.”
Mr Dayha believes Rubik’s Sudoku is an ideal Mother’s Day gift. “It’s something to completely relax mum. She can take her mind off all the everyday worries and put her feet up with a cup of tea and puzzle away to her heart’s content. And it’s a gift that never runs out.”
Rubik’s Sudoku has just arrived on the New Zealand market so the timing is perfect too. It retails for around $20 so it is a very affordable way to show Mum she’s the best.
ENDS
Background:
The Sudoku puzzle was designed by Howard Garns, a 74-year-old retired architect and freelance puzzle constructor and first published in 1979. The puzzle was first published in New York by specialist puzzle publisher Dell Magazines under the title Number Place.
The puzzle was introduced in Japan in the paper Monthly Nikolist 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”. The name was later abbreviated to Sudoku.
Within the context of puzzle history, parallels are often cited to Rubik’s Cube. Sudoku has been called “the Rubik’s Cube of the 21st Century.
Sudoku has become a competitive game. The largest Sudoku tournament to date will be held in Chicago, Illinois in mid-June 2006 with competitors vying for a $50,000 grand prize

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