Customer Reviews

Absolutely Nasty Sudoku Level 4 (Mensa)

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is one of the best advanced sudoku books available. There are no puzzles at beginning or intermediate level. The paper is good quality and firm and takes pencil marks or ballpoint and erasures easily. The book is spiral bound and opens flat and easily. There are 242 puzzles of the highest degree of difficulty, two per page. The solutions at the back are all correct. If you are an advanced solver, this is an excellent book for you. It is not easy to find good, advanced sudoku books.

As someone who searches for seriously difficult sudoku, I love this book. The puzzles are all very hard, but still require a variety of solving methods, some of which I find approachable, and others of which are truly painful, at least for me. I agree with another reviewer that it would be nice to have "speaking" solutions, that is, solutions that explain how the puzzle was solved, but solving methods vary so much by player that this is probably only a dream. There are truly no linear solution methods, which is what makes sudoku so attractive.

Compared to the many other books that claim to offer very hard sudoku, this one stands way out as telling it like it is.

I criticised the "Mensa Guide" book for its fragile binding and tiny grids, so I have to award big points for the spiral binding and large grids of this book.

Mostly very tough puzzles, that (like book #3) lived up to the books' name. We're very happy to have bought #3 and #4.

Question, does Mr Longo know there are duplicate puzzles in #4?
#69 is duplicated in 75, 82, 95, 99, 119, and 127.
#134 is duplicated in 202.

After creating a pile of completed sudoku books on my shelf, I decided to tackle the Mensa Absolutely Nasty Sudoku series. And I started at the beginning, working through every puzzle, levels 1-4. I'm almost done with level 4 now, and it has been everything I hoped it would be. I get frustrated, I get angry, I yell at the book -- and that's exactly what I was looking for. Yes, you will have to use ridiculously complicated techniques to solve these puzzles. And best of all, you will feel like you have really accomplished a feat of logic once you are done. It's spiral-bound with high-quality paper, for those who care about such things; basically, for those who are tired of flying through puzzles, this is the perfect book.

This is the only Sudoku book I've found where I can't do over half of the puzzles without notes. So if you want to tax your brain a bit and know about Gordian Polygons then this is the sudoku book to buy. Makes the "black belt" and "ultimate ninja" books look easy by comparison. Still all logic and no guessing required.

These are some really, really challenging sudoku. It would be nice in the next edition if we could have some descriptions on how to solve using the more complicated techniques. It would also be nice if the answers included reference to which of the more difficult techniques were used to solve them.

I ordered Level 3 and Level 4 of this series based on reviewers' testimonials as to how they'd finally found VERY DIFFICULT puzzles. I started with and have gone through several books by Wayne Gould/New York Post (Fiendish; Extreme) and tired of non-difficult puzzles. So I expected pencil-chewing agony from these Nasty Mensa puzzles. Now I'm scratching my head wondering when these puzzles will get truly hard. I'm doing them at one sitting, 30 mins max. I haven't noticed Level 4 as being particularly harder than Level 3, but I've been jumping around in both books, not going chronologically.

I don't consider myself a Sudoku whiz by a long shot, but whazzup? So far (I'm on #170 of 242 puzzles in Level 4), there's an almost predictable pattern to solving these. There might be a time in solving a puzzle when I'm stymied, but once I figure out how to break the blockage, placing the rest of the missing #s becomes truly tedious... chain after domino-effect chain of effortless solutions which quickly fills up the grid and ends up being boring. I'd like to have several logjams to solve...not just one and the rest is easy.

Can anyone recommend truly difficult Sudokus?...requiring "extreme solving" techniques as X-wing, swordfish, forcing patterns, etc (in Paul Stephens' "Mastering Sudoku Week by Week"--excellent instruction for those who want guidance). Maybe the truly hard ones start at #200....??? Will post a follow-up if this is true....

I enjoy this book, but strongly suggest not buying it unless you have exhausted/outgrown the other Sudoku books. This is the hardest book I have found by far. I didn't work through levels 1 - 3 (probably should have). The next hardest book I have is "Even Higher Sudoku". The latter might be good to try before moving on to this book.

If you're a sudoku junkie like me looking for a puzzle book that actually lives up to its title's difficulty, this is the book for you. When I first got this book, I was overjoyed I could not solve the puzzle with the normal methods I used (no guessing either, admit it---that's cheating). If the newspaper's most difficult puzzles don't exercise your brain any more, and the serialized suduko books almost seem like they rotate old puzzles and change the numbers to sell more books, this is something completely different. It's a good thing this is a spiral bound book with thick paper because you WILL be erasing a lot. Mr. Longo, more please more!

Definitely Nasty! I would have liked a section included in the book for teaching the techniques that are required to work these puzzles. Intermediate level strategies just won't be enough.