Quiet browser puzzles and board game guides, arranged for focused play.
1 player · 3-20 min per session
Fill the grid so every row total and column total matches its clue exactly. In this build, the puzzle clears only when every cell is correctly decided as filled or empty.
Fill the grid so every row total and column total matches its clue exactly. In this build, the puzzle clears only when every cell is correctly decided as filled or empty.
You play on square boards that grow from 5x5 to 8x8. The rule set stays the same at every size, but the number range gets wider, so larger boards create more possible sums and more cross-checking. Restart wipes your marks on the same puzzle, while New Game is the option for a fresh board or a different size.
In many paper books, solvers simply shade the cells they believe are correct and may leave the other cells blank once the clue math feels settled. This build is stricter about finishing the board: to clear, every cell must end up decided as filled or empty. That makes the final board state easier to read later, because ruled-out cells are part of the completed answer, not just private scratch work.
Traditional print solving usually gives you no automatic warning if a line has gone too high or can no longer reach its target. Here the game actively highlights lines that are already complete, overfilled, or impossible. The puzzle logic itself does not change, but the feedback makes it much friendlier for casual players who want to test ideas without losing track.
Kakurasu is often published in several board sizes, and some books or apps also change where the clues sit around the grid. This build keeps one consistent presentation: square boards only, numbers increasing left-to-right and top-to-bottom, row clues on the right, and column clues on the bottom. So if you have seen a version with a different clue placement or a rectangular board, the weighted-sum idea is the same even if the page looks a little different.
Kakurasu's own early print history is not documented in mainstream English-language sources as clearly as Sudoku or Kakuro. What those sources do show is the larger Japanese logic-puzzle boom: publishers such as Nikoli built an audience for simple, language-light number puzzles from the 1980s onward, and later newspaper and web exposure helped that whole puzzle culture travel internationally. Kakurasu is best understood today inside that wider pencil-puzzle tradition rather than through one famous breakout moment of its own.
You add the header numbers, not the number of cells. For example, filling columns 2 and 5 gives row total 7, and filling rows 1 and 4 gives column total 5.
Yes in this build. The puzzle only clears when every cell is correctly decided as filled or empty.
No. Restart clears your current marks on the same board. Use New Game when you want another puzzle or another size.
Hint reveals one correct cell, fixes it to the right state, and highlights it as a revealed answer. It can also recover a cell that you marked incorrectly.
They are generated by difficulty, and this build checks them to keep a unique solution.
