Brits enchanted by brainteaser

LONDON – Britain has a new addiction.

Hunched over newspapers on crowded subway trains, sneaking secret peeks in the office, a puzzle-crazy nation is trying to slot numbers into small checkerboard grids. It’s Sudoku – a sort of crossword without words that has consumed the country.

“There’s something about that grid with its empty squares – it’s just crying out to be filled in,” said Wayne Gould, a puzzle aficionado who helped spark Britain’s love affair with the game.

A Japanese brainteaser that has appeared in puzzle magazines in Asia and North America for years, Sudoku hit Britain in the pages of The Times newspaper in November. It now has thousands of followers, a host of Web sites and books, and runs daily in eight newspapers, which compete fiercely to offer their readers the best puzzle.

The name, which translates roughly as “the number that is alone,” has become a handy catch-phrase.

Sudoku consists of a grid of nine rows of nine boxes, which must be filled in so the numbers one through nine appear just once in each column, row and three-by-three square.