Otterblog

If you are like me and spend most mornings before it is light hunched over an inside page in the Journal’s feature section doing the Sudoku puzzle, you can thank (or curse) Michael Mepham.

Mepham wasn’t exactly the creator of the Sudoku (the puzzle originated in Japan), but he was responsible for bringing it to the West and the puzzle’s popularity is testament to his reputation as a dazzling puzzle master.

Mepham died on Sunday in England. He was 62. Here’s the obit, from The Telegraph.

I have preached about the elegance of the Sudoku puzzle before. It is all logic. There’s none of the initial guessing of the Cryptoquote, or the need to know obscure words and trivia that goes with the crossword puzzle, or the tolerance of bad puns for the Jumble. It’s just you and your mind (one of my favorites is the baseball sudoku in ESPN magazine.)

Every once in a while I’ll do a Sudoku puzzle online. There’s about a jillion sites out there. But it is just plain more fun to do it in the paper. The email we received from Mepham’s syndicator says his assistant will pick up where Mepham left off.

And now a special holiday offer from Otterblog. As puzzlers know, the Sudoku comes in four levels, 1-4, with 1 the easiest and 4 just flat out brutal. If you have solved a level 4, send me your step by step solving method for the day involved. The first person to send me a solution that doesn’t involve trial and error gets a Journal coffee mug, and I’ll post the answer and the puzzle so others can see how it’s done.