Brain Games: Over 400 Challenging Puzzles [With Pencil]

The publisher has crafted a beautiful volume housing more than 400 puzzles to tax and exercise those gray cells. It is clearly laid out, printed with good illustrations of the grids and figures to be toyed into solutions. The pages are lightly perforated or scored allowing them to be cleanly removed for convenient carrying for diversion, or copying to work on without ruining the original. And there is even a clever die cut slot to hold a pencil within reach at all times. (Supply your own if you buy this used.) So, The Good is to the publisher's credit. The Bad, however, is laid on the editor. For the contents of this collection and its later cousin are both a bit too narrowly concentrated. By that I mean that nearly all the puzzles are of the math and logic variety. Even the word puzzles generally call for finding patterns in letters, letters to fill a grid, or cryptograms rather than recognizing words to fit phrases or answer questions. The similarity - whether filling spaces with numbers, letters or symbols - becomes redundant fairly quickly and shows a lack of variety found in many other brain games collections. There are precious few pictorial tests, trivia and language quizzes or other varieties to stimulate the average reader. In fact, a large portion of the contents are bound to perplex that reader. So, for the logic enthusiast this is a fetching win-win book. But not for everyman.