Sudoku is a logic-based number puzzle. Sudoku Master lets you play this classic puzzle game alone or live with friends. Compete to see who can solve puzzles faster or work together on the same board. Use built-in training tools to improve your game and become the Sudoku Master.

Sudoku is a logic-based number placement puzzle played over a 9x9 grid, which is divided into 3x3 sub grids called regions. A Sudoku puzzle begins with some of the cells on the board already filled in with numbers.

By following the 3 golden rules of Sudoku, each region must be filled with numbers ranging from 1 to 9. The rules are:

• Any number can appear only once in each row
• Any number can appear only once in each column
• Any number can appear only once in each 3x3 region

To solve a Sudoku puzzle all of the remaining cells must be filled in concord with the three rules.

Sudoku is actually far older than most people think. Its origin is in a form of a newspaper mathematical puzzle that first appeared in Paris, in the Le Siècle, starting around the mid-late 19th century. It took 3 years before a rival publisher – the La France – refined the puzzle to a form that is almost identical to the Suduku we know today. The only difference was the solution, or rather, the La France puzzle had more than one solution.

The first Sudoku – as we know it – appeared in the Dell magazines in 1979 under the name of "Number Place". The credit for it goes to an engineer by the name of Howard Garns, though the puzzle never appeared to be signed by any writer in copy. Garns is believed to be behind it due to circumstantial evidence such as appearing in the magazine's credits list for the puzzle section every time the Sudoku puzzle appeared as well as always missing from the list every time the puzzle did not appear.

In 1984 the Monthly Nikolist, a paper by Nikoli – a Japanese publisher of games and especially logic puzzles – published the puzzle under the name of "Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru". Freely translated to "the digits are limited to one case/must be single". An abbreviation to that name was suggested by Kaji Maki, the president of Nikoli, taking only the first Kanji of compound words to form SuDoku. It gained a lot of popularity in Japan, but was quite restricted to the region.

In the UK, on the 12th of November 2004, The Times published the first Sudoku under the name of "Su Doku". This was the end of a 7 year long journey made by a retired judge from Hong Kong, a then 59 year old New Zealander by the name of Wayne Gould. It took Gould 6 years to develop a computer program that would produce puzzles quickly. Then another year to drive it into the British daily publish. Sudoku caught the public like fire in a dry field, of which it spread throughout Europe, the United States and the rest of the western world.