With countless Sudoku puzzles available as and when you want to play, it can sometimes be difficult to appreciate just how much the nine-by-nine grid took over the world when it started to appear in newspapers outside of Japan in the 2000s.

There was the Battle of Sudoku, a ridiculous war of escalation between newspapers, which led to the Guardian printing a puzzle on every page. 

There were the TV shows, including a bemusing mix of topical panel show comedy and sudoku, and there were the many stories of people missing trains and connecting flights because they were engrossed in the game.

Perhaps the zenith of the mania surrounding Sudoku was a rather infamous disruption to a drug trial in Sydney, Australia, as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald in 2008.

The case itself was a relatively large drug production and distribution case worth AUD$1m (roughly £500,000), of which two men were accused of conspiracy to produce amphetamines with the intent of supplying them, alongside other drug possession and firearms charges.

As is the case with a lot of complex conspiracy cases, there was a lot of evidence and witness testimony for jurors to sit through, with the case dragging on for over three months.

However, this came to a halt when one of the defendants spotted the forewoman of the jury playing Sudoku instead of taking notes. The other defendant spotted the same, which led to an application for a discharge.

According to the testimony of the forewoman, five of the jurors had brought in the puzzles, and they had been playing since the second week of the trial, spending more than half of their time playing the game.

This was not a crime under New South Wales law, but it did cause the trial to be abandoned because the jurors were not paying attention to the evidence. It is not known if it resumed at a later date.