I have loved logic puzzles for years. Sudoku is the NASCAR of logic puzzles.

Personally I actually enjoy creating crossword puzzles more than playing them.

(It also happens that Sudoku gives me a headache, while crossword puzzles give me satisfaction.)

I can usually kill most of my daily commute by doing the crossword, the sudoko, and God help me, the Jumble.

Sudoku is a logic puzzle. The criticism that it can be brute forced applies to a huge variety of puzzles in pure logic. Sudoku puzzles become interesting when the player has to apply multiple observations to uncover a single cell.

Crosswords are essentially vocabulary trivia. Their interest level is usually a function of how well written the clues are — the pinnacle of cleverness being Cryptic Crosswords — combined with the sense that the answers are knowable (for instance, I’d rather do a TV Guide crossword than a NASCAR-themed one, because I don’t know anything about car racing).

It seems to me that the two puzzles will be attractive to different people, or to the same person for different reasons. Someone who loves puzzles can enjoy doing both of them. Why aren’t the crossword puzzle makers all pissed off that newspapers run Jumble or cryptograms?

The problem I have with both Sudoku and crosswords is that when you’re done, all you have is a grid full of numbers or letters. The final solution generally doesn’t have any extra payoff, and so both of them tend to get boring after you reach a certain point. I find Paint By Numbers logic puzzles much more enjoyable than Sudoku, and Acrostics more enjoyable than crosswords, because both of them give you a little prize at the end (a picture for the former, a quotation for the latter).