εpsilon talk

Musings on math and education. Made with love by the Washington Student Math Association.

Kenken Challenge

Most people know how to play Sudoku.

But have you heard of Kenken?

Kenken is a arithmetic and logic puzzle with a similar end goal to Sudoku, where you need to fill in the grid completely. Unlike Sudoku, Kenken has bolded cage areas with specific arithmetic operations.

The objective of the game is to fill up the entire grid with numbers 1-6 such that:

• Each row uses exactly one of each digit 1-6.
• Each column uses exactly one of each digit 1-6.
• Each bolded cage area contains digits that will achieve the specified result using the specified operation. (For example, a cage may have four blanks and say “15+.” This means that the four digits in the cage must all add together to equal 15. Other operations are subtraction, multiplication, and division.)

Here is an empty Kenken puzzle.

Try at it!

Here is the same Kenken puzzle, solved.

Did you solve this puzzle? If so, how did you do it? How do you think you would go about solving this puzzle? What steps would you take?

For clues and strategies to solve Kenken puzzles, check out our post at the Washington Student Math Association! You can reach more about Kenken and other puzzles.