Customer Reviews

Challenging Acrostic Puzzles (Mensa)

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

 

 

This is a fairly good set of acrostics. The clues require a fairly broad knowledge of pop trivia of the 20th and 21st century, as well as a number of SAT words. They *don't* require knowledge of things like "The fifth in the line of Plantagenet kings," or "Scholarly volume outlining the history of Sri Lanka," which some of the Middleton acrostics need. I could solve these puzzles without having to access reference books, but also could not get more than 60% of the answers to any one puzzle's clues on my first pass. In short, they can be completed, and take a reasonable amount of thought and knowledge.

The only good ones were the expert ones, and even they were too easy. If you want a challenge, not something mindless, then get the NY Times Acrostics, or the NY Times Sunday Variety Puzzles, which includes acrostics, diagramless, etc.

Great for keeping the cobwebs out during spring break. Several of us passed it around and turned the puzzles into a 'group' effort. They were great. Not stuffy, not so academic that no one cared, but challenging and difficult--fun to work. And relevant. Great fun, good for competition and full of surprises. I'm not an acrostic nut, but really enjoyed this collection.

These acrostics are challenging, interesting, and fun. It is nice to have a spiral bound book but it's no use if the puzzle is laid out over two pages as is the case here, instead of one page. Makes it difficult to solve when not sitting at a table.

If you're a nut for acrostics, you know part of the fun is that they're HARD. You worry the puzzle for awhile -- sometimes days -- trying to guess words from letter sequences, seeing a phrase take shape, eventually experiencing that "Aha!" moment that lets your pencil or pen fly back and forth from puzzle to clues until the answer emerges.

Unless you're very new to acrostics, you'll find this collection much too easy. I could fill in 99% of the clues right away, and there's no challenge in that.

It takes an astonishing amount of imagination, artistry and technique to create a good acrostic; too bad the pickings these days are so slim.
(Henry Rathvon's acrostics are better than these, but he hasn't published anything new in awhile; Thomas Middleton, the undisputed master of the acrostic, has been gone for years, alas.)