It should be no surprise that a game that’s as much fun to play as Sudoku has a very interesting history as well. Any fan of this game that’s swept North America and other places will be interested to know that the game goes as far back as eighteenth century Europe and one Swiss mathematician that developed a mathematical puzzle. This puzzle was called Latin Squares at the time and for some time after it was first invented, it disappeared after an initial wave of success. But it was soon to resurface and eventually make it’s way to the United States.

The games disappearance didn’t last long. The game was to resurface under the name Number Place in the 1970s in America when the puzzle publisher Dell printed it in a magazine that many puzzle aficionados bought. Once again, those early versions of the puzzle were hard to pin down as Sudoku’s origins took another turn when a Tokyo publisher imported it to Japan for their own magazine that was popular there. The early forms of the puzzle were hardly the success that they are today but there were two major improvements that came along in 1986 that changed the face of the game forever.

At that time, one of the biggest changes possible took place. The gird was changed to include nine 3×3 blocks and as with the rows and columns that were already in place, no block could contain the same number twice. To further increase the challenge, there were no more than thirty clues given and when the Japanese made these refinements, they quickly discovered that they had a craze on their hands that was soon to travel around the world.

By the time Sudoku reached the United States, there were many puzzle fans who had heard of this latest craze that had already swept Japan.