Customer Reviews

Mutant Sudoku

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Here's my story, I suspect some of you might find it familiar. When I first discovered Sudoku about 4 years ago I loved it. For about 1.5 years I did a Sudoku almost every day, hard puzzles during the week and very hard puzzles on the weekend. But then I burned out on it - just too much of the same ol' same ol'. About a year ago I started doing Sudoku again, and enjoyed it, but after a few puzzles I'd stop for a month or so.

Then I got Mutant Sudoku last month, and I'm back to doing a puzzle almost every day. Even better, I'm having as much fun as I did four years ago. There are 10 distinctly different types of puzzles, all recognizably Sudoku, but all with twists and turns that stretch your brain in new ways. Some examples are:

Outside Sudoku - a standard 9 by 9 grid, but the starting numbers are on the outside of the grid
Tile Sudoku - where instead of 3x3 inner grids, you have patterns like a tiled floor, so the boxes aren't all the same size little squares
3D Sudoku - where the grid is projected onto the outside of a geometric solid (very tough)

Each of these new types includes at least a dozen or more puzzles, starting from easy and going to well beyond my capabilities. Then there is a section at the end called Chimeric Sudoku where these different types are mixed in mysterious (and terrifying) ways.

This little book has greatly exceed my expectations. I'm stunned to discover how expandable the basic principles of Sudoku are, and I look forward to going a long, long time before saying "Same ol', same ol'" again.

Sudoku are popular, and entertaining. Sudoku can also easily be generated automatically. Solving a bunch of automatically-generated sudoku gradually raises the question "why am I doing this? I could write a program that solves these things instantaneously, and solving them myself doesn't present any new challenges."

Mutant Sudoku answers this question, by introducing variations within the sudoku theme. The book is divided into chapters, each containing a particular variant. Each one has its own flavor, and each one has its own invariants, that gradually become clear. In addition, these hand-crafted puzzles have nice touches: "ah! the diagonal turns out to have 1-9 in order!". It's observations like this, and the challenge of discovering each puzzle's invariants, that keep these puzzles entertaining.

Buy this book, then branch out into Nikoli magazine puzzles, games magazine, forsmarts-style contests, US puzzle championships, etc.

But first: buy this book!

Love this book for the variety of types of puzzles. Try it if you are looking for something beyond the usual 9x9 in your Sudoku life.

I became a popular columnist because of an article I wrote called Sudoku Variations, which republished the first Number Place puzzle ever made, by Howard Garns. That, I got from Will Shortz. All the rest of the many variants were sent to me by Wei-Hwa Huang, the author of the book here.

Wei-Hwa is the best logic puzzle solver in the world, is a top notch programmer, and knows more about logic puzzles than anyone. His collection is enormous, and world-encompassing.

With all of that skill, he makes *excellent* puzzles. After solving tens of thousands of them, he's got a really good knack for what makes a good challenge. I've got a few hundred sudoku books. It's hard to find "good" ones. But this little book has more depth, more variety, and better challenges than any twenty of the others combined.

He's good enough that he was picked by the US Sudoku Championship to make the puzzles for that event.

I've seen glimpses of his next book, and that will be similarly spectacular.

Interesting twists on puzzles. Thomas always tries to come up with themes for puzzles that the casual puzzle solver might miss. But, if you look a little deeper, you'll see the cleverness underneath.

There's no question that standard Sudoku is an ingenious creation that can provide stimulating mental challenges and hours of enjoyable entertainment. But serious Sudoku solvers will invariably reach a point in their solving experience when the question "Can I solve this puzzle?" devolves into "How quickly can I solve this puzzle?" Once one has mastered the advanced solving techniques that allow a solver to bypass simple elimination by guessing, a small portion of the fun of Sudoku slips away.

MUTANT SUDOKU revives that entertainment value and the scintillating enjoyment of a brand new challenge by providing some of the most bizarre twists and variants on the original puzzle that I've ever seen. Every single variation demands that the thinking solver re-determine how one can apply those well known solving techniques - claiming, x-wings, xy-wings, xyz-wings, swordfish, jellyfish, finned fish and so on - to squeeze out the numbers that fit into these bizarrely re-shaped grids, rows, columns and houses.

But the real pièce de résistance that sets this collection of variations apart from other collections of the same genre is that there are up to a dozen or more examples of each variation. This allows solvers to advance from simple gut-busting puzzle-breaking, head-scratching determination to a certain level of more sophisticated solving within each variation. That is to say, you begin to catch the flavour of the variation and are allowed the opportunity to become somewhat of an expert within that tiny niche of Sudoku altered reality.

Have fun. Highly recommended for advanced solvers looking for new and exciting challenges.

Paul Weiss