Customer Reviews

Mensa Guide to Solving Sudoku: Hundreds of Puzzles Plus Techniques to Help You Crack Them All

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As a sudoku addict who likes to work on hard to very hard puzzles, I really like this book -- it presents a number of advanced techniques, and it contains hundreds of puzzles that seem to run from slightly to very challenging (I haven't done them all yet).

However, a warning is in order: in spite of the large format of the book, six puzzle grids per page is unreasonable. Difficult puzzles require at least some marking up, and this requires space. The small grids are not user-friendly in this regard.

Maybe because I am not a genius, this book was hard to undertrstand. It has tons of puzzles and a plethora of techniques to guide someone in solving the hard sudoku puzzles. However, I needed to buy another book that dumbed it down a little. The 2nd book I bought was Mastering Sudoku Week by Week: 52 Steps to Becoming a Sudoku Wizard by Paul Stephens. This book is wonderful. It is easy to understand and still teaches the techniques to solving the extreme sudoku puzzles. Also, for Mensa Guide to Solving Sudoku: Hundreds of Puzzles Plus Techniques to Help You Crack Them All (Mensa) there are 6 puzzles to a page and that is rather cramped. The harder puzzles require notes/candidate listing, which is nearly impossible with the size of these puzzles.

I am a total beginner at sudoku, but I had fun with the dozen or so puzzles I worked on this summer's fishing trip. So I just had to get a book on the subject... but which one? I decided it would be better to get a strategy book rather than just a puzzle book. I looked at several of them, but this one caught my eye, MENSA is smart people. They should know how to do sudoku real good, huh?

The author of the book is Peter Gordon who, according to the introduction, has been writing and editing puzzles for decades. The puzzles were all made by Wayne Gould, who runs sudoku.com. Wayne did not invent sudoku, Howard Garns did that in the late '70s. It didn't catch on in the U.S. at that time, but it did become popular in Japan, where they changed the rules slightly into what they are today. Wayne created a computer program to generate sudoku puzzles, and got the puzzles published in various English language newspapers. Hence, he was responsible for making sudoku popular in the United States here recently. Peter Gordon's family would always ask for his help with solving difficult sudoku puzzles. Because of that, he put together this book so that they would stop bothering him all the time.

There are 11 chapters in this book. Each chapter is dedicated to one or more related strategies for solving sudoku puzzles. Each chapter explains techniques for solving increasingly complicated puzzles. The chapters are "One-choice", "Scanning", "Elimination", "Subsets", "Interaction", "Candidate-free solving", "X-wing family", "Gordonian logic", "Forcing chains and grid coloring", "Bilocation and bivalue graphs", and "Guessing". At the end of each chapter there are 12 puzzles which may require the use of any of the techniques discussed in the book to that point. After the last chapter, there are pages and pages of puzzles... 800 puzzles alltogether.

Prior to reading this book, I already knew the "One-choice", "Scanning", and "Elimination" techniques. While reading the first several chapters, I figured out "Interaction" on my own. The rest of the techniques are great! Some are very complicated, but they all have one thing in common: working through the explanations and examples in the book give a more complete feel for the relationship between rows, columns, and boxes, and how cells with similar multi-number patterns are connected. Before reading this book, I was a complete beginner. Now I'm better, but I'm not sure how much better. And that leads to my first complaint about this book.

I wish the puzzles were rated as "Easy", "Medium", "Hard", or something like that. On the fishing trip, the puzzles we worked had 1 star if they were easy, on up to 5 stars for really hard ones. At that time I could solve an easy one in fifteen minutes or so. I'm up to puzzle 37 in this book right now, and these take a lot longer than 15 minutes to solve. I guess it's good that I can solve them at all, but it would be nice to know whether they are 3 star puzzles or 5 star puzzles. My only other complaint about this book is that after 2 weeks, the binding has already failed! It's a puzzle book... it really should be spiral bound.

Still, I am glad that I got this book instead of a book that only contained puzzles. I've learned a lot about sudoku, and I have hundreds of puzzles to work on... enough to last me a long while. And the price was ok, too.

Also, I recently got a cheapy sudoku puzzle book in the grocery checkout line, and I went straight to the hardest puzzles in the book and they were no problem... this book prepared me well!

There's a section for each solving method: one-choice, scanning, elimination, subsets, interaction, candidate-free, x-wing, gordonian logic, chain forcing/grid coloring, bi-location/value graphs, and guessing. The topics are covered well. A number of puzzles requiring the techniques just taught follows each section. Additional puzzles follow the teaching section. Negatives: 1) (as another reviewer observed) the grid size really is a little small for the more complicated puzzles, 2) (as another reviewer observed) the binding is looking a little questionable even with careful use, 3) and my biggest gripe, no section on construction puzzles. I'd have liked to get some insight on constructing puzzles at specific difficulties. Specific difficulties with specific requirements (these numbers in these cells) would have been even better.

If you're looking to improve your Sudoku technique and are confused by the many books on the market, this is the one to get. Here's why:

Strengths: It starts with the basics and clearly explains all the techniques you'll ever need, including some that are very advanced. Topics include scanning, elimination, subsets, and interaction (the basics, which will enable you to solve easy to intermediate puzzles); the x-wing family (including swordfish), which will enable you to solve difficult puzzles; and advanced techniques such as Gordonian logic and forcing chains, which will enable you to solve very difficult puzzles that you'll rarely encounter. Even if you can't follow some of the advanced techniques, you'll still learn enough to do most puzzles. The author also includes a website that solves Sudoku puzzles, which will tell you if a puzzle can be solved by logic or if you have to guess. The program uses X-wing and swordfish, but I don't think it includes every advanced technique, so it may guess in some situations where an expert would not. But it is very helpful, since it includes an option to suggest the next step rather than proceeding directly to the solution.

Weaknesses: Yes, the grids are small. A simple solution is to copy each puzzle on a larger piece of paper, which will also preserve the binding. To me, the biggest weakness concerns the answers to the puzzles. The answers at the end of each chapter are okay, since you know that the puzzle deals with the contents of that chapter. But for the 700 or so puzzles at the end of the book, the author should have given the answers in stages, predicting where you're likely to get stuck and indicating what would help at that point (X-wing, swordfish, etc.). Of course, you can use the computer program to help you figure that out.

In sum: Don't be put off by the weaknesses. If I were teaching a course in Sudoku (and I am a teacher), I'd make this the required text.

I'm with the other people who described the problem with the binding of this book: it's poor. Just like another reviewer, within the first couple of weeks, the binding started to come apart, and I've been handling it carefully to keep pages from coming out, which will begin soon, I fear. And it wasn't through any rough handling on my part: I handle books like precious objects, with a lot of care and respect. The binding STILL failed very quickly.

The content is pretty good, and I'm learning a lot of advanced solving techniques, however I'm noticing that the book is a little short on examples of some of the more advanced patterns, and variations on those patterns. For example, the first end-of-chapter problem in the chapter on Forcing Chains and Grid Coloring had me totally stumped, despite the fact that I knew that one of the variations on the chapter's patterns of XY-Wing, XYZ-Wing, and Turbot Fish had to be present. Finally, I consulted sudopedia.org, and lo, they offered two subtypical examples of XY-Wing, the first of which was covered in the book, the second of which was not. I'd spent perhaps 6 hours staring at that one puzzle, and after reading of subtype two at sudopedia, I spotted the example of it in the puzzle after about 10 seconds!

Basically, I think the book could be improved by having not only solutions for the end of chapter problems, which it has, but also highlighting of the critical pattern in the candidates, at the critical juncture where the special pattern taught in that chapter must be located to enable you to finish the puzzle (without guessing), in case the reader just had too much difficulty finding it, as I did. Also more elaboration on some of the more complex patterns and how to go about searching for them would be useful.

Aside from those few shortcomings, this book is pretty good! I can't say I'm sorry I bought it. But it could be better.

The book does a very good job of laying out the entire range of techniques needed to solve Sudoku puzzles. I'm sure that most inveterate Sudoku puzzle solvers have come up with many on their own. However, the author does lay out many that require a willingness to really study them, if the reader is going to be able to recognize opportunities to use them on a regular basis. There are a few time where a little more explicit explanation of the logic involved would have been helpful.

One really great feature is that the book has far more puzzles than any puzzle book I 've seen. I think that the book could have been a bit more helpful if the practice puzzles incorporated in the chapters had a key that indicated the type of pattern the author expected the "puzzler" to use to solve the particular puzzle. That would help in terms of developing the "recognition" ability.

Peter Gordon's Sudoku solving techniques and Frank Longo's puzzles are a great combination. The book is a must read for anyone wanting to master Sudoku.
Once you tire of the ordinary level Sudoku puzzles and want to solve the real tough ones, you will feel the need for this book.
Prepare, however, to devote quality time, free of distractions, as the book needs to be studied carefully and understood and is not a fast read. The book also includes a huge number of puzzles of increasing difficulty which will keep you engaged for a long long time.

Most Sudoku books are a collection of puzzles of varying complexity with either no solving strategies other than the basic rules of Sudoku or with a brief, superficial look at the more elementary solving methods.

"Solving SodoKu" by Peter Gordon is the exception. It covers virtually all the techniques required the crack the more difficult "evil", "diabolical", etc. type puzzles. It starts with the fundamental methods and graduates up to the difficult strategies. Each chapter includes a number of puzzles solveable using the method in the chapter to practice the technique. The book also has about 700 more puzzles. So far this is the only book I have found that goes into the level of detail to identify the "key" to the puzzle and then solve it. After working thru the techiques I am now finding and solving many puzzles using the Gordonian Logic family of strategies. That chapter alone was worth the price of the book.

I highly recommend the book if you are serious about solving super-tough puzzles.

Unfortunately, I could not give the book a 5 star rating as the puzzle size (6 per page) is too small and the binding is poor. My book is simply falling apart after what I would consider normal use. I'm also getting tired of copying the puzzle to a larger blank grid to properly work the puzzle.

The book is long on puzzles (a good thing) but short on dialog (not so good). For 200+ pages there isn't a lot of writing in here. All the advanced techniques are indeed discussed but it's mostly just a glazing of the subject. Usually there is only one example of each type of problem given in detail and hardly any discussion on tips of how to look for each type of scenario, and pitfalls to watch for. With the associated puzzles included you eventually start to put it all together but it's not in keeping with what you might expect out of any kind of training or educational manual. Furthermore, the binding on my copy was poor. Pages continue to fall out of the book, and with this book there is a lot of going back looking for explainations. I suppose for the money it's ok since there are lots of puzzles to solve and you can learn new tricks however it was less than I had hopped for. The author should have spent a little more time writing to make it a really good book. Overall it's a thumbs down and I wouldn't recommend it.