Kakuro, every day
Today's puzzle is below — play it here, with pencil marks and a clock. A new one appears every day, and every grid is checked to have exactly one answer.
One answer, and why that is not a given
A Kakuro that looks perfectly reasonable can easily have four different answers. It is not rare and it is not a sign of a careless generator; it is what happens by default, and it takes real work to avoid.
The reason is structural. Take four squares at the corners of a rectangle, where the top two share an across run, the bottom two share one, and the two columns likewise. Add one to a diagonal and take one off the other, and every clue in the puzzle still reads exactly the same. Two answers, and no way to tell them apart from the clues.
That pattern is the smallest case of a general one, and no Kakuro grid can be built without it. So every puzzle here is run through a solver that counts answers and stops the moment it finds a second, and anything with more than one is thrown away rather than published with a shrug.
Difficulty that means something
The levels here are named after what a solver has to do, not after how much of the grid is blank. Easy means every square can be pinned down. Medium means at least one has to be ruled out instead. Hard means deduction stalls once and you follow a digit to its consequence. Expert means you have to do that twice over, one inside the other.
Those four are decided by running the grid through a solver that works the way a person does, and recording the hardest thing it needed. A puzzle labelled hard needed a branch; if it did not, it goes on the medium page instead.
This matters because the usual alternative — labelling by how many clues are shown — does not survive contact with the game. Grid size and difficulty are close to independent in Kakuro, and a compact grid can be far nastier than a sprawling one.
Playing it here, or on paper
Every page here does both. The puzzles printed into the page are real ones from the same generator the browser uses, so a printed sheet works with no JavaScript at all, and the answers follow on their own page after the puzzles rather than beside them.
The grids print at a size you can write candidates into. That sounds like a detail until you meet a medium puzzle in a newspaper at four millimetres a square and discover there is nowhere to put the four digits you need to remember.
Nothing here needs an account, and nothing is held back for one. Pick a level and print.
Common questions
- What is Kakuro?
- A number crossword. Each run of white squares carries a clue that its digits must add up to, digits run from one to nine, and no digit repeats within a single run.
- Are these Kakuro puzzles free?
- Yes, all of them, with no account and nothing held back. Print as many as you like.
- How do you know each puzzle has only one answer?
- A solver counts them. It searches the grid and stops as soon as it finds a second answer, and any puzzle that produces one is discarded before it can reach a page.
- What difficulty should I start with?
- Easy, even if you are experienced at Sudoku. The reasoning is different enough that the first few grids are about learning which clues are worth reading first.
- Does the daily puzzle change at midnight?
- It changes at midnight UTC, so everyone plays the same grid on the same date wherever they are. Yesterday's is still reachable from the level pages.
Check this before you rely on it. This tool is provided free and without warranty, and its results are not professional advice.