Despite its Japanese name, Sudoku wasn't born in Japan — and it isn't even that old. Here's the real story of a puzzle that became a daily ritual for millions of people.

1979: Number Place, an American invention

The modern version of Sudoku was created in 1979 by Howard Garns, a retired architect from Indiana, USA. He published it in a puzzle magazine, Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games, under the name "Number Place". The 9x9 grid divided into nine 3x3 blocks is already exactly the one we know today.

The underlying concept — filling a grid without repeating a digit in a row, column or block — was inspired by "Latin squares", a mathematical object studied as early as the 18th century by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler.

1984: Japan gives it its name

Number Place remained relatively obscure in the United States. It was the Japanese publisher Maki Kaji, founder of the Nikoli puzzle publishing house, who discovered the game in an American magazine and decided to introduce it to Japan in 1984, under the name "Sūji wa dokushin ni kagiru" ("the numbers must remain single"), quickly shortened to "Sudoku" — literally "single number".

In 1986, Nikoli refined the formula further: the number of digits already present in the starting grid was capped at 30, arranged symmetrically around the center. These two aesthetic and difficulty rules contributed greatly to the game's success in Japan.

2004: conquering the world

Sudoku remained essentially a Japanese phenomenon for nearly twenty years. The global turning point came thanks to Wayne Gould, a retired New Zealand judge who discovered the game during a trip to Japan and developed a computer program capable of automatically generating grids. He convinced the British newspaper The Times to publish a daily grid, which happened in November 2004. Success was immediate, and Sudoku spread through the world press within months.