It took me a while to catch on to the sudoku craze. I think the first time that I realized this was turning into something was when Bob Rittenberry, a senior citizen who goes to my church, asked me if the Times-Gazette would consider running sudoku puzzles and said that he was hooked.

The idea of sudoku is that you have a 9-by-9 puzzle grid which is also divided into nine 3-by-3 boxes. The puzzle uses only the digits 1 through 9 (no zeroes), and a few numbers have been scattered into the puzzle to start you out. The object is to complete the puzzle so that no number appears twice in the same row, twice in the same column or twice in the same 3-by-3 box. So if you have a “7″ in the top left box you know that there won’t be any other 7s in the top row, or in the left-hand column, or in the top left 3-by-3 box. By process of elimination you have to work out where the numbers go.

I tried a sudoku puzzle not long after that but didn’t really catch on. Then, this week, I followed a link on a blog to a site with online sudoku puzzles, and this time it clicked. I’ve played it several times since, leading to me downloading a sudoku game for my cell phone.

Even the new large-format TV Guide (which I hate, by the way) has gotten into the act, although its sudoku puzzles use letters instead of numbers.