Brits Crazy For New Puzzle

People Everywhere Seen Playing Logic Game

(AP)  Britain has a new addiction.

Hunched over newspapers on crowded subway trains, sneaking secret peeks in the office, a puzzle-crazy nation is trying to slot numbers into small checkerboard grids.

It's Sudoku, a sort of crossword without words that has consumed the country.

“There's something about that grid with its empty squares. It's just crying out to be filled in,” said Wayne Gould, a retired judge and puzzle aficionado who helped spark Britain's love affair with the game.

A Japanese brainteaser that quietly has appeared in puzzle magazines in Asia and North America for years, Sudoku hit Britain in the pages of The Times newspaper in November. It now has thousands of avid followers, a host of Web sites and books, and runs daily in eight national newspapers, which compete fiercely to offer their readers the best puzzle.

The Independent offers four a day, of varying levels of difficulty. The Guardian boasts that its puzzle is “hand-crafted by its Japanese inventors,” rather than spawned by a computer like the others. The Times is offering a version for mobile phones. The Daily Telegraph promises a 3-D “ultimate Sudoku” version.