Customer Reviews

Mensa Math & Logic Puzzles

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

 

 

Whenever I see a new puzzle book printed under the Mensa name, I usually stay clear. Those multiple-choice IQ tests just aren't my thing. But this book is a welcome exception. For those of you who are fans of math and logic puzzles, I cannot imagine a better or more economical choice of books.

The puzzles are similar in style to those found in Games magazine, Japan's Puzzler magazine, and the World Puzzle Championships. These are not the same, tired puzzles that make their way into dozens of puzzle books and Dell publications. These are highly original, brain-busting fun!

I had a great time completing these puzzles. There are twenty different types of puzzles in this book. Some of the puzzles were old favorites - Battleship, Dominoes and Number Place, but most of them were new to me. This was a welcome change from the same old puzzles I had been doing for years.

Some of the puzzles can be found in Games Magazine or Dell's Math and Logic Problems magazine. If you like those magazines, but crave a little more variety, then you'll love this book. Unlike those magazines, there are no word problems in this book. In fact, none of the puzzles required any reading at all. No real math is required either. They all used some type of square grid format that is appealing to mathematical and logical minds.

This is a really high quality puzzle book, with great puzzles, good quality paper (you can erase puzzles and redo them later), and spiral binding. You get a lot of puzzles for your money. I wish the authors would create a second edition! The other Mensa books just don't compare. If you like this book, you'll probably also like Mind Sharpening Pixel Puzzles and Perplexing Pixel Puzzles.

When I finished the last puzzle in this book, I felt quite proud of my skills in the puzzles I'd solved through logic only, and proud of my perseverance in the puzzles I couldn't get through logic and had to guess on. In some cases, like in Black And White and Dominoes, I was able to discover a certain technique in the first few of the set that I could apply to the rest. In this respect, I think the book made me better at logic puzzles.

If anyone can get through every puzzle in this book without having to guess, that person is truly a super-genius. It seems to me like the authors' main goal was to include just enough clues so that the solution would be unique. This is admirable in a way, as picking the right clues to include seems like quite a formidable task, and the authors have done it well. Lighthouses #10 is the only puzzle with more than one solution (one ship can be placed in either of two locations), and only a couple others seemed to have extraneous clues. However, this minimal clue-giving makes a logical breakthrough that much harder.

That said, this is a great book to keep a puzzle solver occupied. Enjoy it!

I'm not even a big fan of math and logic puzzles, but there was enough variety in here that I was entertained for a long time. And it won me over to a number of puzzle types that I wouldn't have guessed I'd have liked.

The puzzles are very well-made -- trial and error plays little role in most of the solving, and you won't find unintended solutions.

First off, as other reviews have stated, very little math is required to solve these puzzles. There is one puzzle specifically that is a sort of numerical crossword puzzle, but that's about it. Certain theorems from geometry might be useful in developing strategies to solve some of the puzzles, but they are not required. For example, one fact that might be useful is that if you draw a line through a closed loop in a plane that does not touch the loop tangentially, then the line intersects the loop at an even number of points.

Secondly, these puzzles will require you to develop innovative processes and strategies for solving them, otherwise they will be complete guesswork (and will be no fun at all). There are at least 10 (sometimes 20+) puzzles of a given type, so once you get your strategy down you should be able to solve most of the rest without too much of a headache.

The puzzles themselves are deceptively simple in principle. Some of them involve placing objects within a grid (battleship-style), some involve drawing a loop through a triangular, square, or hexagonal grid to satisfy certain requirements, others involve dividing up a region into pieces, etc. The "Black and White" puzzle that you can see in "Look Inside!" is fairly representative of what they're like. Developing the solution strategies is where most of the fun (and challenge) lies. Some tend to be comparatively easy in my opinion (e.g. End View, Snake Tiles), others are extremely difficult (e.g. Half Dominoes, Skyscrapers).

Warning: There is at least one puzzle that has more than one solution, although the authors don't claim that all of the solutions are unique. That bugged me though.

All in all, definitely worthy of praise. If you are mathematically and logically minded, you won't be disappointed. Otherwise, you'll probably be frustrated.

The puzzles included in this book contain require no math and only a little logic. A more appropriate title would be "Guessing Puzzles" because solving them requires a lot of luck.

Other than the misleading title and content, I found that the puzzles themselves lacked true variety; they all require the same basic skills. The only true difference between them is the format.

I have seen better books of this nature. The puzzles from the World Puzzle Championships, by Will Shortz, although not my cup of tea, are authentic, and require a wider spectrum of skills.

In addition, for those looking for actual mathematical puzzles, consider anything by Martin Gardner or H.E. Dudeney.

With all of this said, the only reason I give this book a passing grade is for its reasonable price and large volume of puzzles. If you enjoy "lateral logic" and possibility, then you may get more from the book than myself.