Soduko is probably the puzzle game that has risen the fastest in popularity these past few years. It's roots go back to the ancient times. Of course it didn't have the exact same form as it has now. However, most people believe that Magic squares that is a game going back almost 5000 years and Latin squares are the ancestors of sudoku.
The game of soduko in it's current form was first created in the seventies but with a different name (Number Place) and was actually invented in the USA, contrary to the popular belief that it is a Japanese game. Nonetheless it didn't become popular at that time at least in the Western world. The journey of soduko continues to Japan where it gets the name that we use today by the Japanese puzzle company Niccoli.
Soduko arrives in Europe several years after in 2004 and it become an instant success and all major newspapers in the UK start publishing daily soduko puzzles. It didn't take long for this new craze to cross the Atlantic and reach it's home. This time Number Place with it's new name becomes extremely popular and is probably today one of the most popular puzzle games (If not the most popular). It's popularity is evident simply from the fact that dozens of variations of soduko have been created within a very short amount of time.<.
The main appeal of the soduko puzzle is that they are solely based on logic. No maths, knowledge or anything else is required to solve a soduko puzzle just plain, pure logic. Of course not all soduko puzzles are the same. Difficulty levels vary from easy to impossible.
Actually it is sudoku and not soduko but this is what happens when you register domains before your morning coffee so let's just refer to it as soduko here.