Customer Reviews

Think Tank

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The most impressive characteristic of this book is how the designers have been able to incorporate three-dimensional puzzles into the structure. Many of the puzzles pop-up into form when you open the page and you can physically manipulate the pieces to work through the puzzle. The puzzles are:

*) Hog-tied in the saloon - a puzzle where two card dealers are supposedly tied together

*) Babylon - a puzzle where you slide numbered tokens from one side to another never putting a larger number on top of a smaller number

*) Jumping frogs - sliders containing a green frog on one end and an orange frog on the other are to be moved from one configuration to another without violating intermediate rules

*) Four-square fold - a slider puzzle where each slider has four colored sections

*) Crossing the bridge - four blue cars are on one side and four red cars on the other and the goal is to reverse which color is on which side

*) Pyramaze - a maze where you are to traverse a three-dimensional pyramidal maze

*) The pairing maze - in this case the goal is to move colored balls along a maze into a selective rearrangement

*) Hampton court maze - a replica of the hedge maze of the time of Henry VIII.

*) The beer glass puzzle - in this case the goal is to rearrange sliders so that a man disappears and a glass of beer appears

*) Get off the Earth - the classic Sam Loyd puzzled of the disappearing Chinese warrior

*) Double image, a folding jigsaw puzzle - in this case you are to take the pieces of a picture of the Mona Lisa and fold it so that it displays a picture of Marilyn Monroe

*) The folding magic square - in this case, you are to fold a flat structure so that the colors in the cells have a particular alignment

*) The Lo-Shu magic square - placing numbers in a 3 x 3 grid to make a classic magic square

*) The magic square - order four - in this case you are to fill in the remaining cells of a 4 x 4 grid to make a magic square

*) The flexi-square - you are to fold a piece of paper to make particular designs

*) Minimal length ruler - you are to slide markers to positions on a ruler so that you can measure every distance from 1 to 16 units

*) Minimal length circles - a circle is divided into seven equal distances and your goal is to place three markers on the circle so that all distances from 1 through 7 can be measured

*)Love me, love me not - you start by placing 13 bee markers in the center and you are to move them to an alternate configuration without violating any rules

*) The illusion wheel - a series of line segments is drawn with markings on them. Your goals is to determine which segment is divided exactly in half by a marking

*) The magic room - in this case you are to fold a three-dimensional structure so that it has a specific configuration

*) Space rescue - a set of 49 images of space aliens is given and you spin a spinner. The first person to recognize the image having the characteristics of where the spinner landed is the winner

*) The great escape - in this case the user is to manipulate a figure containing an image of Harry Houdini so that it can escape

Solutions to all of the puzzles are included if you get frustrated. As is generally the case when I encounter puzzle books, I spent a lot of time working through these puzzles, although I can't really complain. Time spent working quality puzzles is by definition not time wasted.