BRCHAD

I made a site to create and share KenKen games.

September has been such a productive month. I made another site, this time I built something to create and share KenKen games. I called it SudoKen, because KenKen is a trademark and it felt prudent to avoid possible - or imaginary - legal issues.

KenKen is a logic-mathematic game similar to Sudoku, created by Tetsuya Miyamoto in 2004.

I had just stumbled upon KenKen during my Crosswords search. TO be precise, I found out about KenKen while I researched Will Shortz, Crossword Editor on the NYT. Shortz was one of the most mainstream pushers of KenKen in the USA.

I found out about the game and found articles celebrating it and telling me this was going to take the over the world. Articles, mind you, part fluff and part real articl.

All KenKen books Shortz was involved with credit Miyamoto as the creator of KenKen on the cover. Which was interesting.

The more I learned about KenKen, the more I wanted to create and play KenKen games - preferably on a player of my own making. So that's what I did.

Inspired by my Word Search website, I split the KenKen website in 3 parts: Home, Editor and Player. This proved to be a wise decision and the development run in a more smooth fashion than previous projects.

The editor alows the design of games on grids of different sizes. It is possible to save designs in the form of game seeds.

It is possible to generate games choosing grid size and operations allowed, no need to actually design your games.

I tweaked the game generation to make it less boring and the results were okay. The generated games got more fun, but they are below man-made games.

I also made interstitial ads for the website. Interstitial ads show when the user changes sections on the site. It is a less invasive form of advertisement, in my opinion. On this website the ads are shown before a game is played. To make this screen less advertisy-ish, the site shows information about the game the user is about to play.

Most KenKen sites try to copy Miyamoto's style in presentation, so to differentiate my site from others I used colors on my games.

I made the website between 4 AM and 9:30 PM, with some sleep hours in between. THe process took less than 24 hours, and I couldn't be more satisfied with the results.

Made in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Development was assisted by Copilot, an AI development-oriented AI.

September 2025