Sunday, February 8, 2009

There's A New Game In Town: NYT Launches KenKen, Print Is Saved.

Tomorrow's NYT marks the launch of KenKen, a new daily puzzle that will surely save print journalism from immediate death.

Yes, this Sudoku-style game will now appear six days a week alongside the crossword, apparently as a sop to readers still starved for a puzzle even after reading Thomas Friedman's column. The title means "cleverness, squared," according to Will Shortz's accompanying story.

Shortz looks like the big winner here, at least for the time being. Amazon already lists 14 different Will Shortz KenKen books for sale, some of them co-authored with Tetsuya Miyamoto, a Japanese math teacher who invented the game in 2004.

How exactly does this help the NYT? Presumably the newspaper thinks that adding a game will deliver yet more customers for its print edition. But why put a new game in the NYT that apparently delivers more money to Shortz's bank account than to the company's beleaguered bottom line? Just wondering.

As for the NYTPicker, we're still mourning the loss of the Saturday NYT News Quiz.

1 comment:

kendoku said...

For those without access to the NYT, there are also games available to play online. Below are a couple of sources I found from a quick Google search, enjoy!

http://www.kenken.com/
http://www.webkendoku.com/
http://www.minuplu.com/