Ah, Sudoku: Pastime of princes and caliphs! Ancient number puzzle, the solving of which gives us a glimpse at the very architecture of the universe! Invented, legend has it, in a dimly-remembered age (1979), in the exotic kingdom called Indiana.

Sudoku—that solitary, portable pencil-and-paper game that everybody loves—is at last a bulky tabletop game with parts you can misplace!

First, you set up a puzzle on the board using the black numbers on the included tiles. You can use any nine-by-nine puzzle you want—pick one from the included book, use an online generator, do one out of your daily newspaper, whatever. It’s open source!

Then solve the puzzle with the rest of the double-sided colored tiles. The black side’s for your definite answers; the red side’s for your possible answers; and the red side of the mini “thinking tiles” will help you consider several possible choices for one square.

Already you’re thinking: “If I play this with my kid, he’s going to know the reason we never play catch with a football is because I can’t throw.” And maybe, yeah. But consider this:

As a party activity, tabletop Sudoku is vastly superior, morally speaking, to certain other often-played games. We’re not pointing fingers here, but many an extramarital dalliance has germinated in the seemingly innocent directive: “Left foot green.” You’ll find tabletop Sudoku kindles no urges toward impropriety.

Plus, if you play a lot of Sudoku anyway, this is a more environmentally responsible way to do it. Assuming, that is, that you were going to play enough Sudoku to go through as many pencils’ worth of wood as it took to make this game. Which, first of all, maybe you press too hard or something, because that’s a lot of pencils.

The Sudoku board game is handsome, you’ve got to give it that. And it’ll hold strong appeal for those brainy, competitive kids who thrive on finding answers to puzzles before the other participants do. We know these kids well. We used to see them at the Math Olympics.

Did we never tell you we went to the Math Olympics a few times? Yeah. It was always at the last minute that our school, lacking an official Math Club, threw together a team—a sort of ragtag Dirty Dozen of whichever students were on a hot streak with their standardized tests. And we’d ride in a minibus up to Ann Arbor or somewhere, where we’d face off against much more serious competitors from much bigger schools. Once, when asked by his opponent across the table what school we were from, one of our guys said “Midvale School for the Gifted,” which he took from that Far Side cartoon, the one with the kid pushing on the Pull door, remember? Anyway, it was just a joke, but the opponent freaked out. He thought he might be in a mismatch. Which he was, but not the way he was afraid of.

Anyway, that kid—if you could take this game back in time to find him—he’d love kicking your tuchus at it.

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