Some of the world's biggest newspapers publish it every day, millions of fans around the world swear by it, and now the game of Sudoku is luring hundreds of Indian addicts.

After the Hindu and Asian Age newspapers started to publish the game, which consists of a nine-nine-square board with most squares empty, hundreds have been puzzling their heads on how to fill each square with a single-digit number so that each column (top-to-bottom, left-to-right) has 1-9 in them.

The Japanese word Sudoku combines in itself the words 'number' and 'single' and is becoming the perfect new-age avatar of the ubiquitous crossword.

"It is simple, yet quite complex," said Samiran Dey, a crossword junkie who has recently discovered the joy of Sudoku, for long the most popular puzzle in Japan.

"It just gets gripping by the minute and, soon, you cannot get up unless you've solved it."

It is this mania that makes Sudoku such a hit with publishers and fans. Such is its brain-teasing ability that in Britain a Sudoku book has become a bestseller and newspapers are constantly upping each other in publishing the most convoluted puzzles.

In Japan, more than 600,000 Sudoku magazines are lapped up by fans every month.

It has barely reached India and is already drawing that instant sign of popularity - blog entries. "I am already getting obsessed with it," writes a blogger called Balaji in his site Bala-graphy.

"It's just a simple elimination logic but is sure interesting. I am planning to time my solutions for Sudoku from tomorrow. But it has already started another quarrel between me and my brother for the puzzle."

Sudoku has its roots in the Latin Squares of an 18th century Swiss mathematician. Newspapers around the world say that publishing Sudoku grids have lured new readers to their papers, some even suggesting that Sudoku could ring the death knell for the crossword.

"In a visual world, the appeal of the crossword is, I think, becoming limited," said Ranjan Srivastava, a schoolteacher. "In fact, we are in the age of the picture and the number - these are two things that people understand much better than words nowadays."

Also, the fact that Sudoku requires far lower literacy levels than crosswords makes it accessible to a far wider audience and it already has a readymade market of millions of devoted puzzle fans around the world who are welcoming it as the new big thing.

"There is almost a Zen-like simplicity in the Sudoku," said Shonali Bhowmik, a yoga teacher.

"I think it appeals to me and so many other people because it is so easy to understand and play and yet requires so much brainstorming to crack. It's like the yin and the yang in the same game."