Bye Bye Sudoku - Hello Shukuma

When you thought Sudoku had dropped in popularity enough to finally admit - you haven’t a clue how to play it… along comes the next puzzle to mess with your mind: Shukuma.

A word forming puzzle that follows in the footsteps of Scrabble, Boggle and the humble word search, Shukuma is the brain child of Matt Jones. Matt, an Information Architect, designs patterns for a living. This pattern however took nearly 6-years to perfect and it’s finally done.

Shukuma (meaning ‘Movement’ in Zulu - and you thought it was another Japanese term) has a number of playing options, yet the one promoted on the official website is pretty simple. Find 20-words. Any words. Just as long as they are, well, um… long! The longer the word, the higher the score. Working on doubling your score for each letter of the word find only 4-letter words (ahem) and you’ll only score 16-points at a time. Find a whopper, something a little challenging - like ‘Antidisestablishmentarianism’ and you’re going to score big.... um… very big… the first letter ‘A’ gives me 2 points, the next letter ‘n’ doubles that and gives me 4 points, the ‘t’ gives me double again so that’s 8-points, ‘i’ 16, ‘d’ 32, ‘i’ 64… as I said - VERY BIG.

The aim of the game - play by yourself for a bit of fun - stretch the ol’ gray matter or challenge your colleagues. The one with the highest total score after 20-words… wins.

What was that other game called again? Sud-something. Whatever!