Daily Kakuro

About Daily Kakuro

Kakuro looks like a crossword filled with numbers instead of letters. Black cells hold clues, and each clue gives the total of the white cells to its right or below it. Every white cell takes a digit from 1 to 9, and a single run may not use the same digit twice, so a clue of 3 over two cells can only be 1 and 2. The answer is found by arithmetic and elimination rather than guessing.

On puzzle-kakuro.com the daily game is the Special Daily Kakuro, a page headed with the date that shows the same grid to every player that day. The site also has Easy, Normal and Hard grids from 6x6 to 30x30 at any time, plus a weekly and a monthly special, a Hall of Fame of solve times for the standard sizes, and a statistics page. The puzzles are free with ads; patrons can remove them, and the site links to the PuzzleGym app for iPhone and Android, which carries Kakuro and the family's other puzzle types. Patrons of the site can go back through the last 30 daily puzzles; everyone else plays the current day's.

The player options are generous for a number puzzle: pencil notes, a helper that lists the digit combinations for a sum, highlighting of wrong sums and duplicates, and a night mode. It suits people who like sudoku but want some arithmetic in it, and anyone who enjoys learning the small set of sums that have only one possible combination.

How to play Daily Kakuro

1. Open the Special Daily Kakuro on puzzle-kakuro.com; the date of the puzzle is shown under the grid.
2. Each clue in a black cell gives the sum of the white cells running right of it or down from it.
3. Fill every white cell with a digit from 1 to 9 so that each run adds up to its clue.
4. Do not repeat a digit within one run; the same digit may appear again in a different run.
5. Use pencil notes for cells with several candidates, and the combinations helper to list the sets of digits that make a sum.
6. Press Done when the grid is full to check it and see your time.

Tips

• Learn the sums with only one combination: 3 in two cells is 1 and 2, 4 in two cells is 1 and 3, 16 in two cells is 7 and 9, 17 in two cells is 8 and 9, and 6 in three cells is 1, 2 and 3.
• Look at where an across run and a down run cross: the cell can only hold a digit allowed by both sums.
• A run of nine cells always adds up to 45, so in long runs work out the missing digits instead of the present ones.
• If a two-cell run must be 1 and 3 and its crossing run cannot use 1, the cell takes 3 and the other cell takes 1.

Questions