When your number's up

Every night when I get home from work, we have dinner. Then after we've eaten, AB and I sit down to nut out the puzzle page from The Times. We battle the crossword; the Polygon; and the puzzle-that-has-stopped-the-nation, Soduku.

I'm talking about a puzzle so famous and so addictive that we've recently had a TV show broadcast across the UK featuring celebrities trying to nut out the solutions live on air. You know you've made it when celebrities risk real-time ridicule trying to work you out!

I'm not sure whether my Aussie readers will have encountered Soduku. And for all of its 'fadness' (to create a Gab-ism for the moment), the Internet doesn't seem to have a catch-all page to describe it to you. But I did find this one page, that tries to explain the rules, then gives you a shot at solving a sample puzzle. It also has a cheat button, if you need it - no such luxury with the newspaper version.

There are also PDF versions of the daily puzzle on newspaper websites, so people can go nuts on public transport, frantically scribbling number combinations across the grid (presumably to take their mind off the hell-cat bus drivers!).

Batreg and I can be known to go cross-eyed; hurl pens; drink copious amounts of coffee; and say rather rude words several times over, when a Soduku puzzle we're working on looks like it's solved, but we've buggered it up in one square without realising, and thrown the whole thing out.

So I challenge you to get involved in this numbers game, but be warned. Once you get started, it's very hard to stop. Think about when you started playing Tetris. How long was it before you started seeing little coloured blocks in your sleep?!