What strategy tips will help me solve Kakuro puzzles?
There are lots of rules that you can use to help you solve kakuro puzzles.
The key technique perhaps is an awareness of all the combinations that can go in each run of a given length with a given sum.
What you need to do is look through and find those runs that have few combinations. For instance if you have 17 off 2 cells then you can only have 9 and 8, so each can be marked straight off with 89 and 89.
Another technique is to look at where runs crossover. Sometimes there is only one number that is a possible combination in common across both the runs, in which case this is placed in the crossover cell.
Using brute force or guessing should not be required with a well constructed kakuro puzzle that has one solution - so a good kakuro puzzle is either hand made or created using a generator that simulates the rules that humans use when trying to solve the puzzle.
Also remember to use pencilmarks else you will find all but the most easy of kakuro puzzles too hard to solve in your head alone.
Because kakuro puzzles are conceived to be quite tricky, they have not taken off in Europe in the same way as they have in other parts of the world, for instance in Japan kakuro is second in popularity only to sudoku, but it has not really taken off in Europe to anything like the same extent.
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