The publishing craze sudoku is sweeping America. “Three weeks ago, no sudoku books were on USA Today’s top 150 list. Now, there are six. In sudoku, the game is laid out in adjoining grids. Players must figure out which numbers to put in nine rows of nine boxes so that the numbers one through nine appear just once in each column, row and three-by-three square. The phenomenon originated in 1979, when one of the grids, titled ‘number place,’ was published in an American puzzle magazine.”