From Sudoku to Number-Picture Hybrid magazines: Introducing Russian Sudoku audience to other logic puzzles

• by
• Maxim Popov

Friday, September 14, 2007

The world has become a very small place. Thus, same as in many other countries across the globe about two years ago, Russian public interest in logic puzzles has accelerated along with the emergence of Sudoku. Our first Sudoku magazine in Bauer-Russia was Sum-Do-Ku, by now the most popular Sudoku magazine in Russia.

Using this successful magazine as a platform, we introduced our readers to two other number-logic puzzles: Kakuro and Battleships. We then continued expanding our offering with Slitherlink and Hitori. Reader responses in both cases clearly indicated that Russian people are very interested in new types of logic puzzles. This led to the creation of the current Sum-Do-Ku concept which offers a wide range of number-logic puzzles in a single magazine.

Practically the same people

The positive feedback we received encouraged us to continue in that direction and experiment with more puzzle types. But there was still one obstacle to pass: on one hand we knew we cannot provide more and more new logic puzzle types in a Sudoku magazine, and on the other hand special magazines dedicated to relatively un-known puzzles such as Slitherlink or Hitori were still high-risk products. Furthermore, a research we conducted showed that Sudoku magazine readers and picture-logic magazine readers are practically the same people.

As this has never been done in Russia before, and as, after all, Sudoku is what made logic puzzles become popular in Russia as they are nowadays, Zheleznaya Logika contains almost 50 percent Classic Sudoku and various Sudoku variants while the rest of the magazine contains other number-logic and picture-logic puzzles. Nevertheless, the correlation between the number-logic and picture-logic reader groups just was what we needed to know to make up our minds and launch Zheleznaya Logika as the first mixed number-picture logic hybrid magazine in Russia.

About the author

Maxim Popov is Deputy EiC at Publishing Group Bauer Russia - Conceptis' exclusive partner in Russia since May 2002.