How to Create Ikura Puzzles in Puzzle Maker Pro

Summary: Ikura puzzles are quick to produce in Puzzle Maker Pro — the Creator has two settings, so most of your time goes on styling and output rather than configuration. This guide covers creating a single puzzle, then batching a book’s worth, including how to build a difficulty gradient by hand.

Overview

Ikura is the addition-only 3×3 cross sum: place 1 to 9 once each so every row and column hits its printed total. If you are not familiar with the puzzle itself, read How Ikura Puzzles Work first — this page is about producing it.

The module is deliberately narrow. There is no grid size to choose (the board is always 3×3) and no content to supply (no word lists, no image packs). What you control is how many digits are given, whether the digits still to place are listed beside the board, and how the puzzle looks.

Required Modules

You need Puzzle Maker Pro with the Ikura module.

Editions for this module.

Lite creates Ikura puzzles and exports the static formats — JPG, PNG, SVG, print PDF and PowerPoint — and includes Instant Puzzle Books, a book PDF assembled straight from your current settings (margins, trim size, layout), every puzzle the same, with no extra book setup.
Productivity adds Time Saver for batch creation and Puzzle Book Studio Productivity, which gives you full book editing across multiple puzzle collections combined into one book.
Productivity Interactive adds this module’s interactive output: Puzzle Slides and online play. See Puzzle Maker Pro Editions Explained.

Making books at volume? You need Productivity — that is the rung that adds batch creation.

Commercial rights:

Lite and Productivity both carry the licence to sell the finished puzzle products you make — puzzle books, worksheets and printable packs — to your own readers and customers, on KDP, Etsy, Teachers Pay Teachers, or your own store.
Productivity adds the right to sell or supply the puzzles you generate to other publishers, businesses and sellers.

Preparation

Nothing to prepare. Ikura needs no word list, no images and no source content — the digits 1 to 9 are the whole content model. Open Puzzle Maker Pro and select Ikura from the Math category.

Choose How Many Digits Are Given

On the Main tab, set Given digits. This is the module’s only difficulty control, and it runs from 0 to 5 with a default of 4.

Fewer givens means a harder puzzle:

5 — the easiest setting. Four digits to place.
4 — the default, and the layout you will recognise from printed puzzle magazines. Five digits to place.
3 or 2 — harder. At two givens a solver has to open with pair sums rather than a single blank.
1 or 0 — the hardest settings you can ask for, but see the note below: at these values the generator will usually publish more givens than you requested.

Two things happen automatically and are worth knowing about:

The count can go up, never down. If the number of givens you asked for cannot pin the grid to a single solution, the generator adds a digit rather than publishing an ambiguous puzzle. This matters most at the low end: an addition-only 3×3 board with no givens at all has around ten valid solutions on average, and measured across 120 boards, one given pins 80 of them and two pins the rest. So a request for zero or one given will nearly always come back with one or two. Set 2 if you want reliably hard puzzles; treat 0 as “as few as this board allows” rather than a promise of an empty grid.

The givens land on a shape. At four givens they occupy either the four corners or the four edge centres; at five, the corners plus the centre. That is what keeps the puzzles looking like printed ones instead of scattered. Because both four-given shapes are used, your boards still vary.

Show or Hide the Digits Still to Place

Also on Main, Show digits still to place controls the discs beside the board that list the digits not yet printed — one column up to five digits, two columns below that. It is on by default.

This is presentation only. The list restates what is already deducible from the grid, so switching it off does not change the puzzle or make it harder to solve in principle — it just removes the reminder, and the board renders more compactly.

Leave it on for younger or more casual audiences, and for anything aimed at solvers who like to cross digits off. Turn it off for a tighter, more traditional look, or when you are fitting more puzzles per page.

One knock-on worth knowing if you sell the interactive output: with the discs switched off, Puzzle Slides has no discs to place its tiles on, so it falls back to a standard tile bank instead. The tiles themselves are unaffected.

Style the Puzzle

The Style tab controls the board’s colours and lines:

Canvas — the page background.
Answer circles and Answer circle outline — the fill and border of the nine circles.
Total boxes and Total box outline — the boxes holding the row and column totals.
Digits-to-place discs — the colour of the discs beside the board.
Answer digits and Totals — two font rows (family, size, colour). They share one underlying font, so changing either applies to both.

Two Ikura-specific things the tab deliberately does not expose: the digits printed on the discs always render white so they stay readable whatever disc colour you pick, and the = glyphs keep their own size so they fit the thin columns they sit in.

Styling otherwise works the same way across every module; see How to Customize Puzzle Designs in Puzzle Maker Pro for the controls themselves. The Layout tab handles cropping, puzzle area and the per-collection Use branding toggle, again as it does everywhere else.

Set the Title

On the Layout tab, the title options let you print a heading on each puzzle. Smart Titles works the same way on every module — see How to Create Smart Puzzle Titles in Puzzle Maker Pro for the mechanism.

What is specific to Ikura is the list of options. At the default four givens they resolve like this:

Ikura — e.g. “Ikura”
Ikura Difficulty — e.g. “Ikura Medium”
Difficulty — e.g. “Medium”
Custom — your own text. This is the default, so the title stays blank until you type one.

The difficulty word comes from the given-digit count: five givens reads Easy, four or three reads Medium, two or fewer reads Hard. Note that four and three both read Medium — if your book has chapters that need distinct labels, use Custom titles for those rows. The same option list also feeds the Description field, which defaults to “Place the digits 1 to 9, each once, so every row and column adds up to its total.”

Generate and Export

Set Quantity in the header panel, then create the puzzles. Each puzzle comes with its solution. (The free demo and unlicensed tiers force Quantity to 1.)

Export to JPG, PNG, SVG, print PDF or PowerPoint from Lite up. With Productivity Interactive you also
get:

Puzzle Slides — a PowerPoint deck in which the digits still to place become movable number tiles, positioned over the printed discs.
Online play — exported HTML plus a ZIP for the BookPublisherTools WordPress plugin, so readers can play the set on your own site. See How to Play Puzzles Online for what that looks like for a solver.

Batch a Book’s Worth

With Productivity, use Time Saver to produce many puzzles at once: add an Ikura row, set the given digits and quantity for it, and add more rows for other difficulties. Batch runs are de-duplicated, so a run asks for genuinely distinct boards rather than repeating one. See How to Batch Create Puzzles with Time Saver.

To create a book or section with progressive difficulty, you can edit rows in the Time Saver: For a 100-puzzle book, that is four rows of 25: five givens, then four, then two, then one. Using 5 / 4 / 2 / 1 rather than 5 / 4 / 3 / 2 keeps each block on a different printed difficulty word, since four and three both read Medium.

From there, Puzzle Book Studio assembles the pages into a finished book.

Outcome

You have a set of Ikura puzzles with solutions, styled to your book, exported in the formats you need — and if you batched them, ordered by the rows you set, from easiest to hardest across the volume.

FAQ

Which edition do I need to batch-create Ikura puzzles?

Productivity. It adds Time Saver for batch creation and Puzzle Book Studio Productivity for assembling multiple collections into one book. Lite creates puzzles one run at a time and assembles with Instant Puzzle Books.

What formats can I export?

JPG, PNG, SVG, print PDF and PowerPoint at every edition. Productivity Interactive adds Puzzle Slides and online play. There is no interactive PDF for this module.

Can I choose the grid size?

No. Ikura is always 3×3 — that is the puzzle, not a setting. Difficulty comes from the number of given digits instead.

Why did I get a puzzle with more given digits than I asked for?

Because the requested number could not pin that particular board to a single solution, so the generator added one rather than publish a puzzle with two valid answers. You will never get fewer givens than you asked for. It is most common at zero and one given, where a 3×3 addition board rarely has a unique answer.

How do I make a book that gets harder as it goes?

Add one Time Saver row per difficulty band and order them, highest given-count first. There is no automatic progression for Ikura because the board size never changes.

Can I put pictures or letters in the circles instead of digits?

No. The digits are the arithmetic — a 7 has to add up to 7 — so they cannot be swapped for images the way Sudoku symbols can.