Inside Japan’s Puzzle Palace

TOKYO, March 20 — Will there be another puzzle craze after sudoku?

Try your hand at three different puzzles from Nikoli, a company run by the self-proclaimed godfather of sudoku, Maki Kaji. Share your reactions and compare your finish times to those of Will Shortz, the Timess puzzle editor.

Perhaps kakuro? What about nurikabe?

If so, chances are it will spring from a Japanese company called Nikoli, run by the self-proclaimed godfather of sudoku, Maki Kaji.

Few Americans had ever thought of Japan as a source for puzzles until a little more than two years ago, when sudoku suddenly took the nation by storm, flooding airport gift shops, and even rivaling crosswords in popularity. Now Nikoli, which publishes puzzle magazines and books, is widely regarded as the worlds most prolific wellspring of logic games and brainteasers.

Mr. Kaji and the company have had a hand in creating and promoting most of the half dozen or so number puzzles that have taken off after sudoku. But Mr. Kaji says that Nikoli has at least 250 more puzzles like sudoku, the vast majority of them unknown outside Japan.

Nikolis secret, Mr. Kaji says, lies in a kind of democratization of puzzle invention. The company itself does not actually create many new puzzles — an American invented an earlier version of sudoku, for example. Instead, Nikoli provides a forum for testing and perfecting them. About 50,000 readers of its main magazine submit ideas; the most promising are then printed by Nikoli to seek approval and feedback from other readers.

That process allows Nikoli to tap into the insatiable urge of Japanese puzzle solvers to tinker and improve, a drive its readers apply to games with the intensity of Toyotas engineers trying to outdo Detroits automakers. Most of Nikolis games are original, says Mr. Kaji, but a few, like sudoku and kakuro, are improved versions of older games invented elsewhere.

Mr. Kaji believes that the world is hungry for more Nikoli puzzles. When he visited New York in December, he said, publishers were besieging him for new puzzles in hopes of creating the next rage.

I want to make Nikoli into the worlds source for puzzle games, said Mr. Kaji, 55, a college dropout who spends his weekends betting on racehorses. We have a lot more puzzles where sudoku came from.

That is a long way from just a decade ago, when Mr. Kaji says publishers in New York and London turned him away when he first tried to interest them in sudoku. Mr. Kaji started Nikoli in 1980 with two friends after realizing he liked number games almost as much as figuring the odds on racehorses. He even named the company after a horse that won a 1980 race in Ireland.

Mr. Kaji says he is now negotiating with American publishers to introduce several puzzles to the United States, including hashiwokakero and slitherlink, a popular game in Japan where lines are connected in snakelike shapes around numbers.

He says he also wants to promote more heavily the half dozen or so of Nikolis puzzles that have already followed sudoku overseas. The best known is kakuro, a mathematical version of a crossword puzzle that uses sums instead of spellings.

Still, none of Nikolis other games has approached the popularity of sudoku, which has been carried, at one time or another, in more than 600 newspapers in 66 countries. It has also been the topic of more than 200 books, which have sold 20 million copies worldwide, according to puzzle authors and publishers.

While no one knows how much revenue is generated by the global sudoku business, most agree it has easily topped $250 million over the last two years from an estimated 80 million devotees. The New York Times syndicate provides a variety of logic puzzles, including sudoku, kakuro and others, for newspapers and Web sites around the world.

Nikoli received only a sliver of that money. Mr. Kaji says his private company, with just 20 employees, had annual sales of about $4 million.

Sudokus popularity in the United States caught Mr. Kaji by such surprise that he did not try to get the trademark there until it was too late. As a result, Nikoli receives no royalties from sudoku-related sales overseas by other publishers.

In hindsight, though, he now thinks that oversight was a brilliant mistake. The fact that no one controlled sudokus intellectual property rights let the games popularity grow unfettered, Mr. Kaji says. Nikoli does not plan to trademark other new games, either, in hopes this will also help them take off.

This openness is more in keeping with Nikolis open culture, said Mr. Kaji, who sat on a sofa in his Tokyo office among pillows adorned with printed faces of racehorses. Were prolific because we do it for the love of games, not for the money.

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