Customer Reviews

The Official Book of Kakuro: Book 1

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I give this one three stars only because there aren't many Kakuro books available. Sudoku on the other hand has probably a thousand. Go figure. Kakuro is a more interesting puzzle in my opinion. Anyway, in this volume the so-called "Hard" puzzle are fairly simple. Most of the puzzles easy section can be solved about as fast as you can write in the numbers. There is one glaring error I found where a puzzle has at least three solutions. The Black Belt, Brown Belt, etc series and the Mensa Kakuro books are much better. All that being said, it probably is a decent beginner book.

I hate Kakuro books where you are suppose to guess "wildly" and cannot be solved through pure logic. This is NOT one of those.

So puzzles might seem less challenging to people who like to use "trial and error" but, for the rest of us, it has plenty of challenging situations that can be solved logically.

It does include some puzzles with more than one answer. So I can't give it 5 stars. But, on the other hand, I haven't found one that doesn't.

This book is nicely done and has good quality paper. It gives a good introduction to Kakuro and tips on how to solve the puzzles. The puzzles are clear, readable, and do-able. The levels of diffuculty are as they are, easy is easy, medium is medium, and hard is hard. I have enjoyed this book and plan to get Book 2 once it comes out. I would recommend this book to everyone.

The Official Book of Kakuro has enough information to get a beginner started with Kakuro. And then more challenging puzzles to keep one interested. I am addicted to Kakuro.

This was my first Kakuro book. It got me up and running quickly.

As a fan of Sudoku, I was somewhat intrigued when I came across this new puzzle book After going through a portion of the puzzles, I found them to be quite challenging. To those who enjoy Sudoku, and are looking for something new, I'd recommend giving Kakuro a try.

This is the easiest book of kakuro I have ever done. I can even do most of the hard puzzles by eye-balling, which I can usually only do in easy puzzles. While I do enjoy the ego stroking, this book does not present much challenge.