A 12-puzzle PDF you can print at home. Every puzzle has a picture behind it to colour once you have solved it.
Download the free PDF (12 puzzles)
Kakuro looks like a crossword and behaves like sudoku. Each run of white squares has a clue number at its head, and the digits you write in that run have to add up to it. You may only use 1 to 9, and no digit may repeat inside a single run.
That second rule is what makes it solvable by logic rather than by guessing. A run of two squares adding to 3 can only be 1 and 2. A run of two adding to 17 can only be 8 and 9. Find the runs with only one possible combination, fill those in first, and the rest opens up from there.
There is no arithmetic skill involved beyond adding small numbers — it is a logic puzzle wearing a maths costume.
Solving narrows your attention down; colouring opens it back up. Doing one after the other on the same sheet uses two quite different kinds of thinking, and the drawing is the reward for finishing the numbers. It also means one printed page gives you two sittings instead of one.
These twelve come from our Kakuro 2-in-1 Puzzle Book, which has 120 of them. The sampler is genuinely free and there is nothing to sign up for — if you like them, the book is there, and if you do not, you have twelve puzzles for nothing.
Print at 100% scale rather than “fit to page”, so the grids stay large enough to write in comfortably. Any ordinary printer paper works for pencil; if you plan to colour with fine-liners or markers, something heavier stops the ink showing through.