A former Orange Media Network staffer who honed his creative skills by crafting crosswords and sudokus for The Daily Barometer has just published his first book of puzzles.
Tucky Helm, OMN’s puzzler from fall 2022 through winter 2024, is the author of “Summadoku: 127 Satisfying & Stimulating Original Logic Puzzles,” published March 6 and available for purchase online.
Publishing a book “feels really good,” said Helm, who graduated from Oregon State University with a degree in Fisheries and Wildlife in March 2024. “All of the work I did (for The Barometer) felt abstract, but now it’s a physical thing I can hold.”
The word “sudoku” is a rough translation of a Japanese phrase that means, “single digits.” The puzzles ask solvers to fill blocks in a grid with numbers 1-9 without repeating a number within the block, column or row.
Helm’s “Summadoku” - a word he created - challenges puzzlers to combine sudoku rules with math deductions and numbered clues in the margins to solve each puzzle. The book includes difficulty levels of easy, medium, hard and “classic.”
The answers to the first 126 puzzles are included with the book, but puzzle 127 is a special challenge. The first three people to send in proof they had solved it correctly won a free T-shirt. Future solvers are eligible to purchase the shirt for $25.
It took a couple of months to compile the work. Helm started by first re-coding a computer program he’d written to generate sudoku puzzles. He designed the book’s cover himself and worked with another OMN alumnus, former Creative lead Alan Nguyen, to lay out the interior.
Initial responses have been positive. “People have sent me photos of the finished puzzles, so I guess they’re actually doing them,” Helm said.
Helm grew up in Portland doing puzzles with his father, a fan of the New York Times crossword. Sometimes, he and his father made crossword puzzles for each other.
In 2022, just before enrolling at OSU, Helm joined a fire crew for a summer job. He and the team were working in Alaska but had nothing to do for a few days, so the nearly two dozen crew members hung out in tents in a parking lot without any cell service while they waited for work to pick up.
The firefighters played cards and tossed rocks at other rocks. “We were kind of getting desperate for ways to entertain ourselves,” Helm recalled. He had some notebook paper and a pencil, so he roughed out a crossword puzzle and drew a few copies to pass around.
Team members liked the distraction, he said, so he created a few more puzzles for them throughout the fire season. Then, on arriving at OSU, he picked up a copy of The Barometer and saw a crossword.
“I wonder if I could do this?” Helm remembered thinking. He made an appointment to talk with the editor and brought some samples for her to consider.
Orange Media Network hadn’t had an in-house puzzler, at least not in recent years. However, editors created a position for Helm to fill. For the next two years, he created multiple puzzles for each of the monthly editions of The Barometer, sometimes sticking with standard crosswords and sudokus and sometimes experimenting with his own designs.
It’s a time he remembers fondly. He found himself thinking of new puzzle concepts even while he was studying for his major, pondering new concepts and shapes and scribbling ideas into the pages of his class notes.
“No regrets,” he said, laughing. “It all worked out.”
After graduating, he joined a new fire crew in Klamath Falls for the summer and took a puzzle hiatus. By fall 2024, however, he started feeling the absence and decided to get back to puzzling. The plan for the book soon followed.
“I kind of always wanted to make a puzzle book,” he said. “It’s a good feeling to have something that’s a permanent relic marking a chapter of your life.”
He’s already planning a second book, this one centered on word puzzles. It’s a version of a puzzle he first tried while working for The Barometer.
Doing the first book felt “kind of like proof of concept. Now I know I can do it,” Helm said. “I’m really excited about what the second one is going to be.”
Puzzles in general are fun because cracking them feels “really satisfying,” Helm said. That’s partly what led to creating the book, “to create that feeling for someone else.”
He hasn’t yet settled on a potential career or long-term life direction, but said: “If I were to be successful doing puzzle books, I’d do that.”