From Wine to Nine: the Sudoku Stellenbosch Social
Earlier this month was International Sudoku Day. A holiday some of us delightfully discovered when it landed on the ORSSA events calendar. In true ORSSA fashion, the day was celebrated with pizza and friendly(ish) competition!
International Sudoku Day falls on the 9th of September, a homage to the classic 9x9 grid, and has been marked every year since 2013 when it was established by the World Puzzle Federation. The puzzle itself is much older than the holiday, with the logic-based number-placement game tracing its roots all the way back to the 18th century.
To mark the occasion, Stellenbosch ORSSA members gathered at Vendetta’s for an evening of good food, good company and some exciting discussions about the upcoming ORSSA conference being held in Stellenbosch later this month. Though it wouldn’t be an ORSSA event without some intellectual sparring, so we took part in a Sudoku competition.
Once the puzzles came out, things got serious. Each player received a printed Sudoku puzzle with a supposed difficulty of ‘medium’. A description quickly dismissed by the attendees as the puzzles were in fact rather hard to complete. As the competition kicked off, one member admitted they hadn’t actually played Sudoku before, sparking a lively discussion of the rules along with the best stratergies to follow. And thus began thirty minutes of intense, if not rather slow paced, puzzling, with some members quietly restarting their grids when they made mistakes.
After several slices of pizza, and one puzzle restart, Mila Starling emerged as the winner of the first annual ORSSA Soduku evening. A title she will try to defend again next year.
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