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Word games or logic puzzles - which do you prefer? When The Times unleashed the Sudoku tsunami in 2004, there were cries of outrage from keen crossword fans that their beloved pastime was being swamped. There were dire predictions that Sudoku would kick cryptic clues off the puzzle pages of our newspapers.

Of course it did not happen. What Sudoku did was pull in a whole new tranche of people who previously had not done puzzles regularly before. The puzzle market in general has expanded hugely - just ask the happy people who produce the blizzard of magazines and books that still fill up the shelves in W H Smith. So crosswords and other word puzzles like times2's Polygon (my personal favourite but then I am biased) have continued to annoy and entertain readers in the millions. From time to time I still receive letters from crossword fans pleading for the logic puzzle craze to end but here at The Times I believe the two sets of puzzlers can co-exist. And there are, of course, many people who enjoy doing both sorts of puzzles.

So here we present two new puzzles to The Times. Pathfinder is a wordsearch with a general knowledge twist and Masyu (the Japanese for Pearls) is a logic puzzle in the Sudoku mould. Originated in Japan by Nikoli, Masyu is more of a visual puzzle and so perhaps less scary to those who are put off by Sudoku's numerals. It was recommended to me by some of the best Sudoku players at the recent Sudoku World Championships in Prague for its logical purity.

The next question: is Masyu The Successor? There has been much coverage recently in other publications about the search for a puzzle that will take the world by storm like Sudoku.

Certainly Sudoku's unique combination of pleasing visual appearance, simplicity of rules and addictive levels of difficulty makes it a very hard act to follow. I know this because, like many others in this line of work, I have been scouring the planet for such a successor. So what do you think of Masyu and, if times2 was to introduce another puzzle, should it be Masyu, another logic puzzle or another word game? Let me know what you think. E-mail puzzles@thetimes.co.uk

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