I built Kakuro Zone!

When I go on work trips, I often use hotel business centers to print out some paper puzzles to do if I’m bored in the hotel room or on the airplane. I almost always do sudoku puzzles, but wanted to mix it up.

As I started exploring different puzzles, I discovered kakuro! They’re a type of logic puzzle very similar to a crossword puzzle, except you add numbers across and down to fulfill rows and columns. It’s super fun to do with paper and pencil!

There’s quite a few kakuro puzzle websites out there, so I didn’t have to make a new website for them but:

1. I wanted to print them in a certain way that would fold well in my notebook
2. I liked the idea of using the date as a “seed” for a puzzle, so I could have a friend do the same puzzle as I did on a given day
3. I wanted to have the game on my phone if I didn’t print it out (but felt a hankering to solve one)
4. I wanted to play with Neobrutalism.dev

With the power of AI, I actually got pretty far a couple months ago! I set it up to be a React and Vite PWA, and got my printable puzzles all done in time for the WeAreDevelopers conference! I had printed puzzles for the week, and was able to play a bit on my phone on the plane as well.

…and then I promptly ignored the repo until this week, because it solved my needs, ha. After the hubbub of GitHub Universe died down, I remembered that I should open source the game and clean it up so that others can play it too.

This is, admittedly, a fairly vibe-coded project. Or should I say, agentically engineered. I did some touching of code, mostly in the CSS. I really cared about the what things should look like on different screen sizes, and how navigation should feel with a keyboard or on mobile, but besides that, I let GitHub Copilot fly here. It felt weird letting go… but it was also nice to just get the puzzle experience the way I wanted, without overthinking implementation logic.

Here’s the repository, and here’s the game again for you to try out!