Game Review: Sudoku + Dice = Indie Puzzler “Disuko!”

You’d need to have hidden under a rock not to bump into the engaging and popular mathematical puzzle game Sudoku. Invented by Japanese puzzle enthusiast Maki Kaji, it’s a 9×9 grid comprised of 9 3×3 boxes. Each 3×3 box, each row, and each column can only contain a single occurrence of the digits one through nine. Each box, then, ends up filled in with 1, 2, 3, … 9, as does each row and column. Most of the puzzle is quick to solve until you get to those last few boxes, where you suddenly realize the cascading effect of earlier decisions and typically have to change things around, often quite a bit, to solve it.

disuko game board

It’s no surprise that there are lots of variants and variations on the basic Sudoku puzzle, and when game designer Benji Torrie learned that there was a 6×6 variant, he immediately realized the potential of using dice to represent the individual values. Rather than a solo player trying to solve a partially-filled grid, he created Disuko! which supports 2, 3, and 4 player competitive Sudoku…

  [ This review continues at PlanetDave.com, the new home for my game reviews! ]

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