Kakuro

💡 Kakuro Strategy

• Learn the forced combinations. A 3 across two cells can only be 1+2; a 4 can only be 1+3; 16 across two cells must be 7+9. These are free placements every single puzzle.
• Longer runs have forced sets too. 6 in three cells is always 1+2+3, and 24 in three cells is always 7+8+9 — the order is open but the digits are not.
• Solve at the intersections. A cell sitting on both a tight across-clue and a tight down-clue usually has exactly one digit that satisfies both.
• No digit repeats within a run. This constraint does more work than the sums do; use it to rule out before you add.
• Yellow clues read across, blue clues read down. Mixing them up is the single most common source of a stuck grid.

🧠 What Kakuro Builds

Kakuro sits where arithmetic meets deduction: you need the sums, but the puzzle is won by working out which combinations are even possible. That makes it noticeably harder than Sudoku, since the candidate sets change as you go rather than staying fixed at 1–9. Players who have exhausted standard Sudoku usually find it the natural next step.