Customer Reviews

Heyawake & Sudoku

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Nikoli provides only human-made (not computer-developed) sudoku. If you are a sudoku fan and have never tried a "handcrafted" one, you should try one of the Nikoli books. You'll have a treat in store. Computer-made sudoku tend to have a single point or band where they are particularly interesting, while the rest is rather mundane. Handcrafted sudoku are usually interesting throughout, without what I call an "unzip" point after which you just do cleanup. Some of them are astonishingly elegant in how they present the solution, and even some very challenging ones yield many numbers before a mark-up is necessary.

I was tempted to try the heyawake by seeing some on the internet, but I found that only the easy ones appeal to me. If you go to the Nikoli website, you can try some. They were not my "thing" in the end, but that did not make the book less worth buying. I had the opportunity to determine whether I liked this type of logic puzzle (I am, in general, a fan of logic puzzles). I got a lot of very nice sudoku to do, and the book itself is very nicely done -- sturdy and spiral-bound.

If you are a sudoku fan and think you MIGHT like heyawake, this is a no-lose book. You will get enough excellent sudoku to make the book worth buying, and you can mess around with a variety of heyawake at different levels until you know whether you want more or never want to see another.

This is only the second book I've found with Heyawake games, which are a great new logic game. The division into easy, medium, and hard is useful, but I could wish it were all Heyawake (as the title suggests) rather than half Sudoku. Sudoku games are not exactly scarce.

It truly takes a while to learn the solving methods for Heyawake, but it's worth the effort. The quantity and varying difficulty of the puzzles is appropriate, but frankly, I could do without the standard Sudoku puzzles. Sudoku variants would have been better. Ideally, I would like to have found a book that combined the Heyawake with Slitherlink and a couple of the other original puzzle types from Nikoli, and ditch the Sudoku. All in all, though, a worthwhile purchase.