Customer Reviews

Mensa Exercise Your Mind Math & Logic Puzzles

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

 

 

This book is a workout for the mind. It covers many logic puzzle types, and by the time you're done with a set, you feel like you've mastered a new skill. I wish they'd put one of these out every year!

Excellent book covering wide range of puzzles.

It's much like the blue book (Mensa Challenge Your Brain Math & Logic Puzzles) - same authors, format, number of pages, etc. Only the puzzles are different :)

So, you get around 75 pages of mostly well-known puzzles and 20 pages of answers.
There are typically between 8 and 20 puzzles of each type, although there are some extremes such as End View (30 puzzles) and Kakuro (only 6).

The puzzle types are:

- Alternate corners
- Battleships (classic, lighthouses variant, minesweeper variant)
- Black and White
- Cross Sums (Kakuro)
- Dominoes (Domino Hunt)
- End View (ABCD)
- Fences (Slitherlink)
- Half-Dominoes
- Hex Loops
- Lighthouses
- Minesweeper
- Number Place
- Rain Clouds
- Skyscrapers
- Snaky Tiles
- Spokes
- Square Numbers
- Square Routes
- Tents
- Worms

This puzzle book, like the blue Mensa Challenge Your Mind Math & Logic Puzzles, is a FANTASTIC collection of puzzles! You don't need any prior knowledge or skills to succeed with this collection, just brain power and a pencil. They are challenging and lots of fun! There is a wide variety of puzzles in this book - some of the same type as the ones found in the blue book, some new and different ones. These are not your standard logic puzzles; there are no words involved other than the instructions. I REALLY wish Tuller and Rios would come out with a 3rd edition of these!

I own both this and the other "blue" book which also has very similar puzzles.

A few of the puzzle types are deterministic in the sense that you can reason to a solution without any backtracking. For example, the Number Place puzzles (variation of Sudoku) are deterministic in the sense that I described.

However, most of the others puzzles appear to be highly non-deterministic. In these puzzles, you can typically reason to part of the solution but then you need to guess at the next step, follow along until you get a contradiction and then backtrack, or continue until the next guess if you don't hit a contradiction. Maybe I am missing something here, but as I say, most of the puzzles are very complex backtracking problems which are better for computer solution. If in fact I am missing something here and the puzzles are deterministic, I would be grateful for some hints.