A few months ago, my internet completely stopped working during a storm.
At first, I reacted like a normal person: checking the router every five minutes, restarting my phone repeatedly, and pretending that aggressively refreshing apps would magically fix everything.
It didn’t.
Eventually, I gave up and started looking through old apps on my phone for something offline to pass the time. Buried between random forgotten downloads was a puzzle app I barely remembered installing.
I almost ignored it.
To be honest, I always thought Sudoku looked like the kind of thing super-intelligent people did while drinking black coffee and reading newspapers. I never imagined myself enjoying a game built entirely around numbers.
But boredom is powerful.
So I opened the app.
Three hours later, I was still sitting there solving puzzles while completely forgetting about the internet outage.
That’s probably the moment I realized this game had officially trapped me.
At the beginning, the game seemed incredibly easy.
You look at rows.
You look at columns.
You place missing numbers.
Simple enough.
The first easy puzzle went smoothly, which immediately gave me dangerous confidence. I genuinely thought:
“Wow, I’m naturally good at this.”
Then I tried a harder puzzle and got humbled almost instantly.
Suddenly nothing made sense anymore. Every empty square looked impossible. I kept checking the same row repeatedly like the answer would magically appear if I stared hard enough.
At one point, I became convinced the puzzle itself was broken.
It wasn’t broken.
I just had absolutely no strategy.
Looking back, those early mistakes are actually one of my favorite memories now because they made the learning process satisfying. Every improvement felt noticeable.
The first time I solved a difficult puzzle without hints honestly felt like a tiny personal achievement.
Which sounds ridiculous.
But also completely true.