This morning on the train, I sat down and opened up the Examiner to the games page to do the Kakuro. A few minutes in, I notice the guy next to me, with his own Examiner open to the same page. Only he was doing the Sudoku. I saw that he’d already done the KenKen, which was only a 4×4 grid. “Hah,” I thought. “Amateur.” I smugly went back to the big kids’ puzzle.

I was maybe halfway done with the Kakuro next time I looked over. He was finished with the Sudoku and was working on the Kakuro now as well. And he was maybe three-quarters done with it already. I set back to work, furiously now. No way he was going to beat me.

Of course he did. “Wow. You are fast at that,” I told him. He laughed. “I get a lot of practice,” he offered, quite nice and good-natured about it.