Customer Reviews

Sudoku: More than 200 Fun and Challenging Japanese Number Puzzles

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I initially picked this book solely because of its relatively competitive price. And I just wanted to own a Sudoku book to play in between the time when I'm bored. It turns out to be that this is a great pick for its price. Like other reviews, for 5 bucks you get 200+ puzzles ranging in different levels of difficulties--suitable for beginners and even more advanced players.

What a great book! Puzzles range in difficulty, so you can do an easy one while trying to half pay attention to a lecture, or you can engross yourself into a difficult one when you are home alone listening to Bach fugues and drinking triple shots of espresso. There is enough room in the boxes to make whatever convoluted notes needed to convince yourself that you are making progress.

I just discovered sudoku a couple of weeks ago, in a moment of satori, and it has transformed my life like nothing before. The hours I've wasted on tetris and solitaire, I can't even bear to think about it. Now that I've discovered sudoku, I have found that I have superpowers. I can collapse the world into symbols, manipulate the forces of the universe to serve my needs, converting reality to base infinite, smiting my enemies with just the powers of logic, challenging all the fractal chaos of the universe to rain down upon me as I bathe in the perfection of my rows, columns, and grids. What I'm trying to say is that I've gotten into this, I recommend this book, buy it for the sudoku addicts in your life.

The appearance of the book is excellent. The quality of the cover and paper used in the pages is the best. It is big enough that the puzzles are easy to see and work. These puzzles are relatively new to our area and there is a helpful section on how the attack the puzzle successfully. I bought it for a Birthday present for my wife and she was delighted to see it. She is saving it to work the puzzles on a Cruise we are taking in January. It was a welcome and delightful gift for anyone that is a puzzle fan!

The advanced puzzles in this book (the last third) are very clever. They require various techniques but yet are all solvable in half-hours time. The Beginner and Intermediate ones are okay too, taking 5 to 15 minutes, respectively.

This is one of the FEW Sudoku books that is truly enjoyable (most others are either too easy or contains errors or require brute force searches to finish).

The print is relative large with enough space for writing in markings. My only complain is the quality of the paper; it is like newspaper so can easily tear if one needs to erase a mark.

I got this book recently because it's a good value. Some books sell for $10 and have fewer puzzles. To get over 200 puzzles for the lesser price was great. The puzzles vary in difficulty, too. I also think a larger sized book is easier to hold and work with. The squares are large enough to pencil in "guesses" while evaluating the possibilities. I don't see how you can go wrong with this book.

This is a great sudoku book. Lots of "bang for your buck" - 200 puzzles for six bucks. It's also nice in that the puzzle size is large and the paper is of a higher quality than some of the other books available, making for easy erasing and allowing for plenty of notes to be made in the squares.

The difficulty level varies as well, which is nice. If you only have a coffee break to work a puzzle on, try an easier one. If you have a long plane ride, try a tougher one. All-in-all, an excellent sudoku book.

This book of puzzles is the most frustrating one of many I have bought. The numbers are put into pretty design arrangements that have nothing to do with the difficulty of the pattern. Some labeled beginner are quite difficult, while at least one labeled intermediate had only one step logic involved. I like to know the difficulty level before I begin so I can choose one appropriate for the time available and challenge that I am in the mood for. You have no idea with this book. There are many good books available, no reason to buy this one.

I used to read books, now I play Sudoku!

The positive aspects of this Sudoku book is the large format and for six bucks there are over 200 puzzles. Also, the advanced puzzles are very challenging, more so than other Sudoku books.

I was struggling for HOURS with advanced puzzle number 61, located on page 208. I finally looked at the answer page, only to find out that the book has a mistake! The puzzle gives you a 1 and 9 in the middle row of the center of the puzzle (Columns 4 and 6, Row 5). The answer key shows the 1 and 9 in row 6!! Whoops . . . .

Unless you feel like checking every puzzle for mistakes, I would recommend buying another Sudoku book.

This is definitely one of the more challenging sudoku books I've tried. The puzzles start off fairly easy, but become almost impossible to solve by the end. The book is divided into sections for easy, medium, and hard puzzles, and within each section puzzles are also ranked on a difficulty scale from one to five. I really enjoyed the challenge here, and still have not solved most of the harder ones. One particularly nice thing about this collection is that the grids are fairly large, so there's plenty of room to pencil in options and notes as you work, which is definitely a must for the more advanced puzzles! In addition, all of the solutions are provided at the back of the book, so you can check your work. I'd highly recommend this collection to any sudoku enthusiast. However, I will offer a word of warning to those who have already enjoyed this book and are looking for others like it - not all of Tammy Seto's books are the same! I've also purchased her book "Sudoku Fever," which turned out to be patronizingly easy. Even the rankest of beginners would become bored quickly. I have not, however, tried her book "Sudoku Mania," so am not sure where that falls on the difficulty scale.

This book was fun, however, the rating system was not relevant to the individual puzzles. For example, a beginner puzzle at level 3 difficulty was MUCH more difficule that an advanced puzzle with a difficulty rating of 4 or 5 (top of the scale). Also, there was one puzzle (I guess on page 208) that had a wrong solution. This was the only mistake I detected. If you treat each puzzle as an unknown difficulty rating, this book is GREAT!