Sudoku.

It’s a logic puzzle that involves placing numbers or letters in a grid such that you get no repeating characters within a given row, column, or highlighted grid.

I got a book of puzzles for Christmas, and things finally slowed down enough I could check it out.

You’d think a publication so prestigious to be designated as the “OFFICIAL PUBLICATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL SUDOKU AUTHORITY” would only promote and publish puzzles of the highest quality and rigor.

That there would be a painstaking process of editorial control, whereby the selected puzzles would represent the very essence of Sudoku as originally intended — and that the puzzles therein would go through a vetting round to earn their stripes as “Easy,” “Middle,” “Hard” or the pinnacle: “Devious.”

You might also assume that the publishers of “SUdOkU Fever” would choose to properly market their product with a sample puzzle right there on the cover. A puzzle that was chosen to establish the first pillar of Customer Satisfaction – that all-important initiative to properly establish and manage expectations.

A Sudoku book with a crossword or a word-find on the front, for example, would be a colossal failure, because not only would it not engage those seeking Sudoku, it would be mistakenly purchased by one seeking a letter-based, verbal puzzle.

In fact – since so many of my readers here have a more decided verbal orientation, maybe a little primer in creating a Sudoku might be in order.

You create a nine-by-nine grid where there are no repeating numbers in columns, rows or the smaller 3×3 grids. Then you turn most of the numbers into blanks. But for the sake of all that is holy, you start with a working grid. You don’t begin with a broken grid and expect it to suddenly blossom into a working puzzle.

And if you do have a broken puzzle, well, I suppose it’s okay if it winds up on the cover, just as long as that error isn’t too obvious — like having two of the same number so obviously in the same frame.