I appreciate the comments. Game and puzzle design is really about experimentation. Having a game evolve out of a search never guarantees the puzzle will be fun to play. The best looking symmetrical and well thought out ideas don’t necessarily have to have mass appeal.
Fortunately Str8ts does and as with most things sometimes ideas just come together as a package and work. When this happens. The best thing is not to ask why, but to simply enjoy the end result.

Jeff

When I wrote the above comment I hadn’t yet tried Str8ts, as I mentioned. When I did try them (over 2 months ago now!) I was pleasantly surprised – I already expected them to be interesting, but they had a lot more depth to them than I’d realised they would have. There were various different types of deduction to be made, and they were considerably trickier than I’d expected! (I’d imagined they would be pretty easy!)

So I think it’s a great puzzle, and I wish you the best of luck!

Gareth

I have been waiting patiently since May 1 for you to give your verdict on Str8ts? I am the inventor of the puzzle and wouldn’t mind your opinion.

As for the protectionism you were referring to it was more based on the fact that certain individuals claimed the puzzle to be their invention on their websites. Taking a unique puzzle from the source is one thing but allowing their audience to believe they invented the concept is very wrong. That was my real issue.

Jeff Widderich

Sorry the comment about Str8ts didn’t appear for a few days – it had a link in so got spam-trapped. Yes, I’ve seen Str8ts but I haven’t tried it yet. I saw the inventor was being very protective of their design by posting on a range of forums to criticise people who had created similar puzzles (not even necessarily exactly the same).

I have to be honest and say I haven’t tried one yet, but it does look quite fun. I’ve seen puzzles in Japanese puzzle magazines which are similar to this, but without being constrained to a 9×9 grid like this – I think the regions (where you can’t repeat numbers) flow across the whole width/height like in Sudoku? It might be interesting to try this type of puzzle (with ’straights’) whilst making the numbers unique only to the ‘current run’ – i.e. something along the lines of Kakuro Straights, rather than Sudoku Straights! Then I could make much larger puzzles, which would solve a bit more like Kakuro than Sudoku.

I will probably try this at some point!

I have been also playing a standard sudoku size puzzle called Str8ts:

www . str8ts . com

It follows the consecutive idea across a crossword region (like Kakuro). It helps me with my Mah Jhong game thinking about consecutive numbers in a region.