is a Japanese publisher that specializes in

game A game is a structured form of play (activity), play, usually undertaken for enjoyment, entertainment or fun, and sometimes used as an educational tool. Many games are also considered to be work (such as professional players of spectator s ...

s and, especially,

logic puzzle A logic puzzle is a puzzle deriving from the mathematics, mathematical field of deductive reasoning, deduction. History The logic puzzle was first produced by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who is better known under his pen name Lewis Carroll, the au ...

s. ''Nikoli'' is also the nickname of a quarterly magazine (whose full name is ''Puzzle Communication Nikoli'') issued by the company in

Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.468 ...

. ''Nikoli'' was established in 1980 and became prominent worldwide with the popularity of ''

Sudoku Sudoku (; ja, 数独, sūdoku, digit-single; originally called Number Place) is a logic-based, combinatorial number-placement puzzle. In classic Sudoku, the objective is to fill a 9 × 9 grid with digits so that each column, each row ...

''. The name "Nikoli" comes from the racehorse who won the

Irish 2,000 Guineas The Irish 2,000 Guineas is a Group 1 flat horse race in Ireland open to three-year-old thoroughbred colts and fillies. It is run at the Curragh over a distance of 1 mile (1,609 metres), and it is ...

in 1980; the founder of Nikoli,

Maki Kaji was a Japanese businessman who was the president of Nikoli, a puzzle manufacturer. He is widely known as "the father of Sudoku" for his role in popularizing the number game. Early life Kaji was born in Sapporo on 8 October 1951. His father ...

, was fond of horseracing and betting. Nikoli's claim to fame is its vast library of "culture independent" puzzles. An example of a

language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...

culture Culture () is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups.Tyl ...

-dependent genre of puzzle would be the

crossword A crossword is a word puzzle that usually takes the form of a square or a rectangular grid of white- and black-shaded squares. The goal is to fill the white squares with letters, forming words or phrases, by solving clues which lead to the answ ...

, which relies on a specific language and

alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syll ...

. For this reason Nikoli's puzzles are often purely logical, and often numerical. Nikoli's

, the most popular logic problem in Japan, was popularized in the

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

-speaking world in 2005, though that game has a history stretching back hundreds of years and across the globe. The magazine has invented several new genres of puzzles, and introduced several new games to Japan.

Nikoli puzzles

Some of the popular Nikoli puzzles, along with their

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

names; terms in parentheses are published English titles for the same puzzles. * (''Corral'') * (''dot to dots'') * * ** * (''Paint by Numbers'', ''Nonogram'', ''Griddler'') * (''Allied Occupation'') * (''Slant'') * (''Go Stones'') * (''Bridges'') * * * * * (''Cross Sums'', ''Kakro'') * * * * * * * * ** * * * (''Cell Structure'') * * * * (''Divide by Squares'') * (''Fences'') * * * (''Number Place'', ''Nine Numbers'') * * * (''Galaxies'') * * (''Alphametics'', ''Cryptarithm'') * (''Word seek'') * (''Arrow Ring'') *

References

External links

Official site

in German and English 1980 establishments in Japan Japanese companies established in 1980 Logic puzzles Puzzle designers Magazine publishing companies of Japan Book publishing companies in Tokyo {{publisher-stub