Customer Reviews

Will Shortz Presents Ferocious Sudoku: 200 Hard Puzzles

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book gives you 100 "difficult" puzzles and 100 "very challenging" puzzles. Although there's no official grading system for Sudoku puzzles, I've done about half the puzzles in this book and I would say those descriptions are accurate. The "difficult" puzzles are hard enough to make me think but not so hard that I've had to use notations to solve them, and the "very challenging" puzzles usually require me to make notations and I've even gotten hung up on a couple of them.

The book is big enough so that the puzzles can be easily read yet small enough that it will fit in your laptop case. It's also very fairly priced for the number of puzzles you get.

Well, I've gone through quite a few sudoku books and thought I was hot stuff. Then Ferocious Sudoku book assaulted my ego. Well, if you're looking to step up to the big leagues, this is the book; I haven't found a tougher one.

These puzzles aren't as hard as I had hoped, but are better than most books. Well worth it, and will pass the time as desired.

I got to where the 100 "hard" puzzles took the same effort that five-star puzzles in the newspaper were requiring of me. The next 100 "challenging" puzzles were just that. Soon I was working primarily the challenging ones and going back to a hard one when my brain needed a rest.
I don't have any complaint about the paper it's printed on or the size of the book. Either regular ink or pencil will do.
I wish puzzle publishers would get over wasting pages by printing answers. Either it comes out right, or you do it over. A few pages explaining advanced strategy would have been more welcome, though the strategies are a joy to discover on my own. Still, I have come to a point where I need some coaching.
This is an excellent book if you don't want to waste your money and time on fast, fun, easy-to-medium puzzles.

This is an good book, with fairly difficult puzzles. I wouldn't say the puzzles are extremely hard. One problem I have with most Sudoku reviews is that they are not specific about what techniques are and are not required, so I always list all the ones I've found required in the book. This book does not require any advanced techniques:

* Elementary techniques (cross-hatching, single cell, single candidate)
* Locked candidate elimination
* Naked pairs, triples, and quads
* I don't believe I even found a single X-wing, although there might have been some fairly easy non-unique rectangles.

Despite this fact, it gives you a pretty good workout on the basic techniques: sometimes you really have to look for your triples and quads. If you are beyond this book, I recommend the Absolutely Nasty series: Absolutely Nasty Sudoku Level 1 (Mensa) is perhaps a tiny bit harder than this book, and Absolutely Nasty Sudoku Level 2 (Mensa) starts in with the more advanced techniques.

If, on the other hand, you have no idea what X-wings, non-unique rectangles, etc. are, but would like to, I recommend that you pick up Mastering Sudoku Week by Week: 52 Steps to Becoming a Sudoku Wizard immediately. You'll be talking the talk and walking the walk soon enough! The pages of the book are good sized, although they are made of newsprint, so they don't take a lot of erasing. The book's small size make it easy to carry around with you.

Overall, a decent if not super-challenging book of Sudoku that can act as a great stepping-stone on your path toward Sudoku enlightenment.

I wasn't getting any kick from the "medium" level any more, so ordered this one. YES, they are hard! Good puzzles.

The printing, though, is rotten. It's on cheap newsprint-type paper (don't use a felt-tip pen) and with so little margin that it's really awkward trying to write on the left-hand pages. A third of the book is answers, printed just two to a page. What a waste. Who uses them anyway? For the same amount of paper, they could have printed 8 or 15 answers to a page and made more margin on the puzzle pages. But then the book wouldn't have looked so thick - a marketing fooler that fooled ME.

The puzzles in this book are as advertised, challenging, but doable without resorting to guesswork. I agree with the reviewer who said that the quality of the paper leaves something to be desired, and the amount of the book taken up by the solutions is too much. However, the price is reasonable for 200 puzzles, and the book is compact enough to carry around easily.

I've done the first 100 puzzles and have found a lot of them to be very easy. I also found three puzzles with more than one solution. Nonetheless, this is a great book and I would recommend it to people who really like a challenge.

This collection of Sudoku puzzles is just what we were looking for. Most other books contain many that are too easy. These are just hard enough to make us think while still being solvable.

I personally cannot comment on how hard or challenging these puzzles are, I bought the book as a gift for my girlfriend.

She absolutely loves it, says its just the right mix of challenge and ease. She, like many had grown bored of the online ones you could print out, so I bought this hoping that she would enjoy it.