KENDOKU

Narrative Report

“If you like Sudoku, there’s a good chance you’ll love KenKen.
If you hate Sudoku, there’s a good chance you’ll love KenKen.”

BSACC 1-2
Bautista, Zien Johann
Castanares, Catherine
Estacion, Shelly Mae
Garcia, Matt Daniel
Jabon, Kenneth
Madrigal, Angeli Kate
Nicolas, Uzzielle
 HISTORY
“It is a bare-handed method, using no
tools,” Miyamoto, 59, said in a recent
interview in his arithmetic classroom
located in Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward.
KenKen, which Tetsuya Miyamoto

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invented in 2004 as an instruction-free
method to help his third-grade students
“I thought of a improve their math skills, now appears in
more than 150 newspapers worldwide,

NARRATIVE REPORT
style of teaching including The Times, The New York
arithmetic to Times, Spiegel Online and the Yomiuri
Shimbun. He began teaching his first
students where you
puzzles to third-graders in 1995 and
‘win without currently teaches primary school students
fighting.’ Without from first to sixth grade. “At the time there
were puzzles for addition, puzzles for
pushing, you get
multiplication, but there were no puzzles
children to think, that mixed all of it — subtraction, addition,
to become multiplication, division,” he said. KenKen
puzzles that use only addition are the
smarter.” easiest, but the puzzles get quite
--Tetsuya challenging when other operations such as
Miyamoto subtraction, multiplication and division are
included in one puzzle.

RULES
1. Fill in each square cell in the
puzzle with a number between 1
and the size of the grid. For 1
example, in a 4×4 grid, use the
numbers 1, 2, 3, & 4.
 2. Use each number exactly once in each row and each column.
3. The numbers in each “Cage” (indicated by the heavy lines) must
combine — in any order — to produce the cage’s target number using
the indicated math operation. Numbers may be repeated within a cage as
long as rule 2 isn’t violated.
4. No guessing is required. Each puzzle can be solved completely using only
logical deduction. Harder puzzles require more complex deductions.
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SOLVING TECHNIQUES
Here’s a sample puzzle that we’ll use to illustrate solving techniques:

Each cage in a KenKen contains a target number and

most contain an operator. If you see a single-cell cage
with just a number and no operator, it means that the
value in that cell is the target number. Such single-cell
cages work like givens in Sudoku puzzles. You won’t
see these in every puzzle, but when you do see one,
you should start there. In this puzzle, we can
immediately place a 4 in the upper right cell:
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Whenever we place a number, this narrows down the

possibilities for other cells, so we want to look for
that. In this puzzle, we know that the 7+ cage in the
third column must contain 3 & 4, since that is the only
possibility that adds to 7. Given the 4 that we just
placed, combined with the rule that we must use each
number exactly once in each row and each column,
we can now tell which of the cage’s cell contains a 3
and which contains a 4:
2
We can now tell that the two empty cells in the third column (in the 4× cage)
contain 1 & 2, but we don’t know the order. However, given that information, we
can place a 2 in the lower right cell to make the cage’s product be 4:

Remember that a cage can repeat numbers in an

irregularly shaped cage as long as no number is
duplicated within a single row or column. In this

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puzzle, before we knew the two values in the 7+ cage,
we didn’t know if the 4× cage contained the numbers
1, 1, & 4 or 1, 2, & 2. Now that we know about the 2,
we can immediately finish the 4× cage because we
know the second 2 must be in the third row:

For more complex deductions, it can be useful to take

notes in the puzzle, which you can do by using the right
side of the on-screen keyboard, holding down the Shift
key while typing on a physical keyboard, or switching
to Pencil input with TouchWrite. In the 2÷ cage in the
upper left, there are only two possibilities — 1 & 2 or 2
& 4. The latter is excluded by the 3 & 4 already in the
row, so we can deduce that two cells contain 1 & 2 (in
an unknown order). Since knowing this doesn’t let us
place any additional numbers immediately, we can use
notes to help us remember it for future use.

Next, we can look at the 1- cage in the first column.

Without knowing any constraints, the cells can
contain 1 & 2 or 2 & 3 or 3 & 4. But our notes show
us that the first column will already contain either a 1
or 2, which means the 1- cage cannot contain 1 & 2.
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This means it must have either 2 & 3 or 3 & 4.

Whichever it is, it means the 1- cage will definitely
contain a 3. And that means the bottom left cell cannot
be a 3, which means it must be a 4: 3
 That also lets us place the 3 in the bottom row and
then the 4 in the second row tells us how to place the 1
and the 4 above it:
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Now we can place the 2 and then the 1 in the top row:

Next, we finish up the first

column, and we can tell the
order because the third row
already has a 2 in it:

4
 Finally, we wrap up the puzzle by placing the last two
numbers in the fourth column:

Note that this is just one

way to solve this puzzle.
Because this is an Easy

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puzzle, there is more than one deductive path for
solving. With harder puzzles, this is not always the
case.
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