28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent starting point, April 17, 2006
This review is from: The Official Book of Kakuro: Book 1 (Mass Market Paperback)
I made the mistake of starting out with /Kakuro for Dummies/. While that's an okay book if you want a random assortment of challenging Kakuro puzzles, it is a TERRIBLE beginner's book. All the /Dummies/ book did was make me feel like a complete idiot.
How is this book different? Simple. The puzzles are carefully arranged to teach you certain skills as you go along. Rather than saying, "here are the rules, and here's a billion random puzzles to solve," Tim Parker has picked an excellent selection of Kakuro puzzles with a nice progression to them. It is clear a lot of thought went into how new players will approach this book. Playing through the puzzles in order will indirectly teach you a great deal about how to solve Kakuro better and faster.
Good teachers will teach you by example, through experience, and by building confidence. Bad teachers (the Dummies book) will throw a bunch of facts at you and toss you into the deep end to fend for yourself. I prefer the confidence-building approach, and this book does an excellent job at indirectly teaching you to play Kakuro.
Highly recommended for newbies and my fellow victims of bad Kakuro books.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Lacking challenge and consistency, May 18, 2006
Most of the puzzles in this book were satisfying. Three of the latter "Medium" puzzles are irritating: two lack unique solutions (for example, the answer key has "3 1" immediately above "1 3," which is impossible to logically distinguish from "1 3" directly above "3 1") and one is actually invalid (the answer key has "2 1 2" as the solution to one "word," and there's no other way to solve it, as the three cells in question must add up to 5.) The other 147 puzzles in this collection are free of such errors. My only other grumble is about the difficulty; I did not notice a significant difference between the difficulty of the medium puzzles and the first 40 hard puzzles, though the last 10 hard puzzles were a significant step up from the first 40. Even the hardest puzzles are not as difficult as those in the Virgin books. I'd recommend this to people who are looking for a first experience with Kakuro, but those with experience with other publishers might want to look elsewhere for additional challenge.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A good starter . . ., April 3, 2006
This review is from: The Official Book of Kakuro: Book 1 (Mass Market Paperback)
I found this to be a good book to start on, not because of the introductory text, but because the easy section was designed to teach specific strategies. When I began the medium section, I found I really needed a chart of the ways to make each sum with different digits. I began developing my own before finding nicely designed ones in Gareth Moore's The Essential Book of Kakuro. Timothy Parker's book's paper quality, binding, and book size are all effective. I'll buy Book 2 when it comes out.
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