I love puzzles. Always have. Crosswords, wordsearches, logic puzzles, you name it, I’m a fan.
What turned me from a consumer to a creator was the origin story of the puzzle the world came to know as ‘Sudoku’.
Having its roots in classic ‘magic squares’ number puzzles, and popularised in French newspapers, the proto-Sudoku puzzle endured across the decades before being published by Dell Magazines in the US under the title of ‘Number Place’. A few years later, it was given its final name of ‘Sudoku’ (a contraction of the Japanese ‘Sūji wa dokushin ni kagiru’, loosely translated as ‘the digits must be single’) by the Nikoli Puzzle Company in Japan.

The final stages of this puzzle’s journey were brought about by Wayne Gould, a retired Hong Kong judge who, having encountered the puzzle in a Japanese bookshop, created a software programme which produced unique puzzles in rapid fashion. From that point, they began to appear in newspaper titles around the world. The rest, as they say (on Wikipedia), is history.
This is a wonderful story in and of itself, but what really piqued my interest in this back-story to a global phenomenon was the notion of actually being a person who could create something which might have an impact on so many other lives. The question took up loud residence inside my brain, “Could I do that?” Could I create a new puzzle, or a new approach to a puzzle, which would be both entertaining and marketable? Something which would sit on newspaper pages next to the Sudokus, Wordsearches and Crosswords?
I began to experiment, tinkering with different ways to approach existing puzzles, trialling a whole host of ideas via a short-run puzzle magazine called ‘Kobayaashi Times’. It featured number puzzles, word puzzles, logic puzzles – I wanted to see what felt as though it could be ‘the One‘.
One particular approach, based on offering various clues to assist the player in placing the numbers 1-9 into a 3×3 grid, went through a number of versions until, in 2010, it settled into two distinct puzzles.
Sujiko & Suko.
Here were two siblings, alike and yet with their own personalities. Non-identical twins. Each assisted the player in different ways to complete the 3×3 grid, and each could be designed so that any particular puzzle offered would contain a single solution.


Now that I had my puzzles, I needed to do something with them. I contacted newspapers, local and national, hoping they would welcome me and my puzzles with open arms, delighted with my creations.
Instead, what I received back was radio silence. I tried different titles. Same response. That’s the point at which I ventured in person to a local newspaper office, and discovered that newspapers receive their puzzles and games from syndicate companies, and that I’d need to approach them if I was to have any hope of seeing my puzzles in print.
So off I set, internet in hand, to track down those syndicate companies which could be my key to fame and fortune.
I forget how many emails were sent out during that time, but for the most part, once more, I was ignored.
And then, one morning, after sending off another batch of “Hey, look at me!” emails, I received a reply back from Puzzler Media, one of the country’s biggest puzzle companies.
They liked my puzzles.
They liked my puzzles!
Now, I’m not the kind of person who actively seeks out validation from others, but I can’t describe how wonderful it felt to have this stranger say to me “We like what we see. We’d like to help you make money from this. We can put your puzzles in national newspapers.”
And, true to their word, in early 2011 both Sujiko and Suko were featuring daily in national newspaper titles. The Times. The Telegraph. It was exhilarating. Trademarks were registered (very important!), copyrights assigned, new titles took the puzzles on, and soon I’d added Master Sujiko to the mix – which to this day features in the Telegraph. It was a rush.

These past twelve years have gone by in a blur of numbers, and Sujiko and Suko are now truly known to the world, appearing in titles from the UK to the US and Australia, in a wide number of magazines, and have appeared on a number of educational websites around the globe. It’s been an amazing ride, and I feel it’s a ride that’s only getting started. I have so many plans for the future of these and other puzzles, and I know there’ll be pitfalls and failures aplenty among the occasional successes, but what drives me onwards is that same question, over and over : “Could I do that?”
The moral to my little ramble is that, in order to turn my questions & musings into a successful reality I needed two things : Perseverance and Luck. Neither alone would have sufficed. I could have worked myself into the ground had it not been for the good fortune to encounter the right person at the right syndicate company who would take a chance on a new puzzle from an unknown nobody, and I would never have had that moment of luck if it hadn’t been for the fact that I’d persevered through all the setbacks, pitfalls and failures over the years it took to get to where I needed to be.
Perseverance & Luck. A hell of a combination.
I hope that, whatever you’re working on right now, whatever vision you’re trying to mould into living, breathing reality, you are blessed with copious amounts of perseverance and luck.
Happy Creating! 🙂
P.S. The first of my collections of both Sujiko and Suko puzzles can now be found on Amazon. You should buy them. They’re amazing. 🙂
Sujiko : https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BSJ9NH4J (or from Amazon.com)
Suko : https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BSJ3FFMX (or from Amazon.com)