Customer Reviews

100 Samurai Sudoku Puzzles

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Samurai sudoku provides larger grids for sudoku without changing any of the original rules. It still uses a standard 9X9 grid so it should be easy. So ho is the grid bigger if it is 9X9? Simple. Five 9X9 grids are arranged in an X-formation. The center grid shares each corner sub-grid with one of the other four 9X9 grids. So, sometimes, in order to solve one of these overlapping sub-grids you will have to look for clues in two different 9X9 grids.

Other than occasionally having to look at two different 9X9 grids all of your favorite techniques for solving sudoku puzzles should still work. But if you are used to solving grids in only a few minutes, then be prepared to take a little longer to solve all five grids. Samurai sudoku offers a more complex challenge without the puzzler having to learn any new rules or character sets.

One-hundred puzzles make up the book with one puzzle per page. The puzzle takes up almost the entire page and has been printed entirely in shiny bold. This can be a little annoying to look at due to the complexity of the grid but puzzlers should get used to it quickly. The puzzles increase in difficulty as the book progresses and all puzzles are symmetric. Solutions are given at the end of the book and are also in shiny bold. A good addition to the sudoku family.

I found this book to be really fun. I bought it for my boyfriend's birthday, and we ended up altenating on the puzzles. The puzzles seemed a little too easy for both of us, so I purchased another similar book, with better results. On the whole, if you enjoy regular sudoku, but feel ready for a new challenge, this book may be just the right fit. If you have already gotten into samurai sudoku, the book may be too easy.

Finally there is a book out with only Samurai Sudoku puzzles - 100 of them! The puzzles are all symmetric and the difficulty ranges from medium to really really tough. Even one of these puzzles takes quite some time to solve. Since each Samurai Sudoku puzzle is like 4.5 Sudoku puzzles, these puzzles are equivalent to 450 ordinary Sudoku puzzles, while still being a handy format. That's very good value for money! I would recommend this to anyone who likes Sudoku and want a bit of a challenge.

The way they have it set up, it's really hard to differentiate between the middle and the end sections. Also, the print is very small so if you have trouble seeing this is no the sudoku book for you. Also, I was expecting a challenge but finished the hardest puzzles in the book very quickly. Good for beginners, but not someone who's already gone through another Samurai Sudoku book.

A "samurai" sudoku puzzle consists of a central sudoku with its corners joining it to four additional sudokus, as shown in the cover illustration, a construction which can provide additional fun for the mid-level sudoku addict. The objective is to solve all five overlapping puzzles. In the more difficult puzzles, none of the corner puzzles can be solved in their entirety until additional information is provided as a result of solving part of the central sudoku, and that, in turn, depends on information from all four corner puzzles.

In the early puzzles, the corner sudokus can be done in their entirety, before solving the central puzzle, and occasionally a central puzzle can be completed before the corners are completely filled, making these puzzles fairly easy. The options for a given box within a square are usually limited to pairs of numbers, reducing the challenges. By puzzle #7, however, the author introduces three options per box and the puzzles begin to be more time-consuming and difficult.

As is sometimes the case with regular sudoku puzzles, however, it is occasionally possible to have more than one correct solution to a single sudoku puzzle. When this happens in a corner sudoku, it can prevent the whole samurai puzzle from being solved. Sometimes it is simply the reversal of a couple of numbers which causes the problem. Though the individual sudoku puzzle can be solved without any "errors," this alternative, "correct" solution is wrong in the overall scheme of the whole samurai puzzle. Puzzle addicts may be hard pressed to figure out how to avoid this problem, even when warned that all puzzles should be done in tandem and not separately.

I found nine occasions in which individual sudoku puzzles within the samurai puzzle had more than one solution--puzzles 12, 38, 46, 55, 65, 78, 79, 88, and 89. This was particularly frustrating in the more difficult and more time-consuming puzzles. The remaining 91 puzzles were clever and fun to do, however, and I've already bought, and look forward to doing, the next book in this series. Mary Whipple

I find the samurai style sudoku very appealing. True, they are more time consuming -- safe to say possibly five times more time consuming! But you can always take a break between areas. They definitely don't all solve in the same direction -- sometimes you need to finish the four outer areas in order to have a chance at solving the inner one, other times the opposite is true. I like that the puzzles are arranged in consecutive difficulty as you advance through the book. I highly recommend this book to sudoku fanatics!

I've been waiting for this one - for some reason there are very few Samurai Sudoku puzzles out there, maybe they are too big to fit in the books... (A Samurai Sudoku is five traditional Sudoku puzzles combined.) I've only solved a few so far but I can definitely say they are not too easy!

Samurai Sudoku! Big. Intimidating. Multidimensional. Sudokus shooting out the corners of other sudokus.

Guess what. It's a gimmick. You know how long it takes to do one of these giant sudokus? Slightly shorter than it would take to do five separate easy sudokus. That's right. It's actually easier. Once you get used to the concept, which shouldn't take long, you realize that the overlapping grids actually provide more information, more data for solving the sudoku. Not harder, easier. I suppose, in theory, one could construct a giant sudoku where the clues were distributed in such a way that it could only be solved in a very particular order, but that would make it challenging in a tedious sort of way, not necessarily a clever thinking-differently sort of way.

For me, the biggest challenge of doing these giant sudokus was just altering my system of annotations, since there is more on the page, more things in the way, and my old system was getting things too muddled. Also, the squares have to be smaller, to fit more on a page, and so it just acts as a disincentive to scratching in notes.

That's okay though. I'm not knocking the giant sudokus. If you like them, great. They are absorbing and fun to see how quickly you can breeze through them. But, in general, I like the old 9 by 9 advanced level sudokus. All the sudoku variations are interesting in theory but I find that, for me at least, they ultimately are not improvements.

You know what would be the next step though, a serious step up? A 3D sudoku. I guess it would have to be on a computer so you could rotate it and solve the puzzle by breaking it down into various sagital and coronal slices. Has anyone thought of that yet? If not, I'm claiming it. You heard it hear, Uncle Stu, July 19th 2006.

I love Samurai Sudoku's! I have been spending money at the grocery store for a year now to buy a book that only has a handful in it. I was so pleased to run across this whole book of Samurai puzzles! It is good and all, but the puzzles do not increases in difficultly. They are all basically at the beginner level and not challenging for someone who has done loads of Samurai's in the past.

This is a good book for those who want to try samurai. I noticed that some grids are still solvable without going into the overlap grids. Also, there are lots of numbers given as clues. I am a bit of a nut about sudoku - (my favourites are killer samurais where you also have to add up number cells within the sudoku grid). If you are already well experienced with samurai, you will find these puzzles quite easy - right up to the "hard" ones. The paper quality is excellent. The challenge I'm giving myself with this book is to use a minimal number of notations. I've done about half of them randomly over the book (including the last ones), and have not found any really tricky ones. So, take note of the guy who prefers single sudokus with advanced strategy needs. This book won't satisfy you lot! But for the rest of us, it's a pretty gentle exercise. It's good to be able to "breeze" thru one whole puzzle within a half hour. If you read my other reviews, you will see I have a favourite author who has designed many books on different sudoku variations, and if he says the puzzle is deadly, he means it!