Monster Book of Japanese Puzzles

This book feels like it was rushed into printing before all the kinks got worked out. I hope the publisher will revamp and correct the book for a second edition. The binding is standard book binding with newspaper style pages (which doesn't stand up well to some mechanical pencils). It's a great collection of puzzle types that you don't usually see, but the introductions lack decent formatting and could be more helpful. A book shouldn't tell you to go look online for better tutorials in their own introduction! It wouldn't have taken but another page for each section to beef the introductions into legitimate tutorials. The puzzles are marked for what level of difficulty they are, but for some strange reason the kakuro section doesn't have them in order from easiest to hardest... like the labels were attached later and they didn't re-order the puzzles. Sloppy. The hitori puzzles have a few errors (such as somtimes having no logical reason to choose between two remaining cells to know which one should be eliminated, so it's up to you to just pick one!). The biggest flaw is that the solutions are majorly messed up (sometimes a cell is mis-shaded, and sometimes the numbers are in a different oder so it's really a different puzzle!). This is easily fixed by visiting the author's personal website for the real solutions at http://www.sudoku.org.uk/PenguinHitori.asp Still worth the money to have so many puzzles and types in one book so you can flip to whatever section your brain feels like dealing with!

I bought this book as a Christmas present for someone else, but it was so much fun I ended up solving many of the puzzles myself! In addition to sudoku and kakuro puzzles, which many people are already familiar with, the author includes hitori, masyu and nurikabe puzzles. There are 50 sudoku puzzles and 50 kakuro puzzles, plus 100 hitori, 100 masyu and 100 nurikabe puzzles. This means there are 400 puzzles in this book--truly a "monster" book of puzzles! You certainly get a lot of bang for your buck. The puzzles are all high quality and the author provides a little introduction before each section of puzzles, giving a bit of history as well as a few solving techniques. I haven't finished the book, but so far I haven't found any errors or typos. So, if you enjoy sudoku and kakuro and are looking for a few new types of puzzles, definitely check out this book! I really hope the author comes out with something similar in the future, because I've become quite addicted to the new puzzles and there aren't many other books that include them yet.

A few weeks ago about the only variant to Sudoku was another number puzzle called Karuro. Oh yeah; there were also some larger ones of 16 X16 cells,some circular,etc.Now, it looks like a feeding frenzy around the Games and Puzzle section of the bookstore.Not to mention the plethora of hand held electronic sudoku games on e-bay. The only thing competing for attention is the raft of books started by the monster hit Da Vinci Code. This author has put out several other Sudoku books and is one of the most popular amongst what is becoming many. For a quick look of 5 different types of "Grid Puzzles";you can't go wrong with this book. It is anybody's guess how many other types we'll see in the near future.But I can tell you this ;I have been a 'puzzle nut' for 60 years and have a collection of over 500 puzzle books;and there are literally hundreds more of variations on grid puzzles. And then there's the whole world of Magic Squares;simply put,you ain't seen nothing yet. There is also another book that has recently appeared,"The Sudoku Code" by Francis Heaney that combines Da Vinci with Sudoku for those who like mysteries and puzzles combined.