™SHENDOKU is an original concept that transforms the puzzle of SuDoku into a genuine two-player - or more - game of skill, bluff and cunning. The concept for the game originated with an educational project researching the famous Chinese mathematician, astronomer, inventor and all round genius Shen Kua. (To read more we recommend the excellent page at wikipedia, and at St Andrews).
The original puzzle of SuDoku evolved from a mathematical concept known as Latin Squares
as discovered by the Swiss mathematician
Leonard Euler. However, the development team decided to put themselves in the shoes of
Shen Kua, an avid game player, and try to extrapolate what he would make of SuDoku.
The most obvious thing was that SuDoku was a puzzle, a single persons solitary quest to find the
contents of a 9x9 grid. This would have intrigued Shen, who played Go in its many forms, including
on a 9x9 grid, and was endlessly fascinated with the pathematical possibilities of the game.
It was logical to assume that Shen would have developed a game himself, and that this would have
involved many of his favourite concepts. The team decided that his invention of grid references for
maps, his knowledge of
magic squares, and his love of game play was likely to have led him to the conclusions
that has been named SHENDOKU in his honour.
SHENDOKU is now a multi part project. We have a range of books in the process of being published
and the first book of SHENDOKU (ISBN 978-1-84728-627-7) is available to order from bookshops or
at Amazon - but for those of you who need more, the entire range of SHENDOKU books will be made
available first through the SHENDOKU shop at lulu, and
many will only be available from that source.
For the latest information, news of book releases and other updates on SHENDOKU computer games, mobile
games, the on-line SHENDOKU and our progress in developing the TV Game Show derivatives, please link to
our SHENDOKU Blog or if you prefer you can Blog in
German or Portuguese. Other languages will be provided as sales of the
books begin in those countries.
This project would not be achieveable were it not for the
help, support and inspiration of our friends at Rorohiko who are the source of
Shendoku generators for InDesign and other programs, developers
of the Shendoku single player game and genuinely nice people to work with.
We also appreciate the excellent Open Source website design of Andreas Viklund
:)
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