Customer Reviews

Twisted Crosswords (Mensa)

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If you are tired of conventional crosswords and want to try something a bit different, Henry Hook's "Twisted Crosswords" might be just what you are looking for. You may have seen puzzles with some of these unusual formats in the pages of Games Magazine, and now you can tackle a complete book of them. The collection contains a generous variety of different puzzle types, each with its unique word placement rules and challenges. Many of them have unconventional, visually pleasing grids that include honeycombs, triangles, weaves, three dimensional cubes, and spirals. Words might be entered diagonally, in a circle, snaking through the grid, or wrapping around the edges. In some puzzles, two or more letters may be entered in every square. In others, there are identical grids with multiple clue sets, and it is up to you to determine which grid the words go into. Words weave, overlap, and intersect with each other in novel ways. Give these puzzles a try!

Eileen Rieback

If you've been a reader of Games Magazine, you'll recognize the format of many of these crosswords. Instead of marching left to right and top to bottom as a normal crossword does, you'll find all sorts of variations: answers arranged in circles, multiple letters in a box and some where you don't even know where to start the answer.

The puzzles themselves are well done, although the introduction and explanation for some of the puzzles leaves a little room for improvement. Once you see how a particular kind of puzzle is intended to be filled in it's fairly straightforward, but with some of them the instructions are quite vague and almost seem to assume you already know how to do the puzzle and the instructions are simply pro-forma.

If you're intrigued by unusual word puzzles, this book is definitely for you. Due to the way that the puzzles are organized, although the clues are not always too difficult, not knowing a few of them can make a puzzle very tricky to solve. These are definitely not for someone who gets easily frustrated.