Customer Reviews

Yang Yilun's Ingenious Life and Death Puzzles

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Volume 2 begins with puzzle number 111 and ends at 200. As a continuation of volume 1 (see my review of volume 1), volume 2 is subdivided into two additional sections, Senior and Advanced. The clues are much more detailed for section 3 and 4 then in the previous volume, and the puzzles are significantly more difficult. The first 46 puzzles, making up the senior section, are for this 3-kyu ranked player, exceedingly difficult, requiring you to be able to read 10 to 15 moves. And for solutions, instead of getting the answer and two or three possibilities, the reader is now provided with 5 or 6 variations with detailed explanatory notes as to why the variation fails, or is weak as compared to the recommended solution. Regarding the ADVANCED section, these puzzles are, for my skill level, brutally tough. Some detail as many as 10 variations - and none of the solutions are obvious (at least to me). I don't know what your ranking must be to readily solve the last set of puzzles, but I suspect that it must be low dan level, at a minimum. The ingenious aspect of the all the puzzles, as I noted in my review of volume 1, is that they are board situations that you are likely to encounter in an actual game. Highly recommended for experienced players only.