Online playable Ikura for your website
Most puzzles do not survive the trip into a browser. They want a big screen, a long sit, or a rules paragraph nobody reads. The ones that work on a web page are small, obvious, and finishable — someone lands, solves, and feels good about it before they have decided whether to stay.
Ikura is one of the few that fits without being cut down. Nine circles in a 3×3, the digits 1 to 9 used once each, six printed totals down the side and along the bottom. Every published board has exactly one solution, so nobody is guessing. It fills a phone screen without pinching, and it is done in a couple of minutes.
This page is about the commercial case — why that board belongs on a site you already own, and what publishing one actually involves. The rules themselves are on how Ikura puzzles work.
Why this board suits a web page
It explains itself. Circles, totals, leftover digits. A visitor who has never heard the word Ikura can see what is being asked. That matters more online than in print, where the buyer has already committed by the time they open the book.
It has no language. There is no word list, no clue to translate, no cultural reference to miss. The same board works for every visitor your site gets.
It is short enough to finish. That is the entire mechanic of a playable sample. Someone who completes a board has had a small win on your page, and your next button arrives in the moment they are most willing to press it. A picture of a puzzle cannot do that; a finished puzzle can.
It re-plays. One board is a demonstration. A short set is a reason to come back — a weekly board, a practice page, a page the same visitor bookmarks.
Difficulty is the givens, not the grid
The board is always 3×3. What changes is how many digits are printed for you at the start.
Five givens is a warm-up: satisfying, quick, and nobody bounces off it. Two or fewer is a proper sit that a confident solver will enjoy and a casual visitor will abandon.
That distinction is your publishing plan, not a technicality. Put the warm-up band on the public page, where a stranger meets it cold. Keep the hard boards behind the sign-up, or in the file people paid for. A visitor who fails your free sample does not conclude that they should try harder — they conclude that this is not for them.
What you need to publish one
Three things, in this order.
The edition pairing that includes web play. Online play is the Interactive add-on. It is bought per puzzle type, as a combined option on that puzzle type’s own product page rather than as a separate item in a cart. The Ikura product page shows the pairings it actually sells — the plain edition with Interactive, or Productivity with Interactive — and Productivity is the rung that adds batch generation and multi-collection books. What each edition covers is on Puzzle Maker Pro editions.
Worth knowing before you plan around it: Ikura ships Puzzle Slides and online play, and no interactive PDF. If your product idea was a fillable PDF, this is the wrong module for it. (Creative and Productivity Editions for all Puzzle Maker Pro products include interactive (hyperlinked) puzzle books).
The free demo runs the real generator, so it will tell you whether you like Ikura. It will not produce a publishable playable catalog — its output is watermarked and one puzzle at a time. Judge the puzzle with the demo; produce the lane with the licensed copy.
Somewhere to put it. The board lives on a page you control, published either with the free WordPress plugin — which needs a self-hosted WordPress site you can install plugins on — or with the player hosted on your own server. A hosted wordpress.com page, a one-page site builder, or a link-in-bio tool cannot run it. One catalog plays per page, so plan a sample page or a weekly-board page rather than five players stacked in one article. The steps are written up in publish a puzzle catalog, and generating the puzzles themselves is how to create Ikura puzzles.
A decision about what the visitor does next. This is the one people skip, and it is the one that decides whether the page earns anything.
Leveled game or plain list — it changes the ending
A catalog published as a plain list is a menu. The visitor picks a board, solves it, and is returned to the list. That is a fine practice page and a poor funnel, because nothing happens at the end.
A leveled game is the shape that ends somewhere: it can carry the completion panel, your own button after the last board, and the built-in email gate that holds later puzzles back until a visitor signs up. If you have published a list and wondered why there is no sign-up prompt, that is why.
Two honest limits on the gate. The address has to have somewhere to go — the plugin forwards it to your list once you have connected one, and a self-hosted player has to point at your own sign-up endpoint; leave either unconfigured and the visitor gets an error instead of a puzzle. And progress lives in that visitor’s browser. Nothing comes back to you as a class roster or a completion report, so do not sell this as a classroom tracking tool. How to arrange the capture and buy buttons around a board is on playable puzzle lead magnet.
What the playable board is for
Three jobs, and it is worth being clear which one you are doing.
A sample that sells the printed product. Three easy boards on your site, the same look and the same givens band as the book or pack, with the button under the last one pointing at the thing you sell. The full set — the hard boards, the graded run, the answers — stays in the file. Print book plus playable sample is that pattern in full.
A reason to give you an email address. The ask lands after the visitor has already got something from you rather than before, which is the whole difference between this and a pop-up.
A habit page. A board that changes weekly gives a returning visitor a reason to come back to a site that otherwise only updates when you publish.
What it is not is a replacement for print. Books, packs and worksheets are still where the money is; the playable board is the second product from the same afternoon’s work — proof, sample, habit. And it is not a hobby separate from your catalogue: the same generated boards fill a math interior, a classroom page, and the page on your own domain. The four-way split is mapped on interiors vs printables vs worksheets vs embeddable puzzles.
Match the promise on both sides
If you sell an Ikura book or a worksheet pack alongside the playable page, keep them recognisably the same product. Same givens band at the entry point, same visual style, same claim about difficulty. A visitor who solved a five-given board on your site and then bought a pack of two-given boards has been surprised, and surprise is what refunds are made of.
The whole point
Ikura is a small, one-solution board that a stranger can finish on a phone — which is exactly the shape a playable page needs. Publish the warm-up band publicly, publish it as a leveled game so the last screen is yours, and let it sell the printed set behind it.