Peter Greene
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16
Average rating: 4.5 of 5
Great fun, almost perfect entertainment. 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.
A "samurai" sudoku puzzle consists of a central sudoku with its corners joining it to four additional sudokus, as shown in the cover illustration, a construction which can provide additional fun for the mid-level sudoku addict. The objective is to solve all five overlapping puzzles. In the more difficult puzzles, none of the corner puzzles can be solved in their entirety until additional information is provided as a result of solving part of the central sudoku, and that, in turn, depends on information from all four corner puzzles.
In the early puzzles, the corner sudokus can be done in their entirety, before solving the central puzzle, and occasionally a central puzzle can be completed before the corners are completely filled, making these puzzles fairly easy. The options for a given box within a square are usually limited to pairs of numbers, reducing the challenges. By puzzle #7, however, the author introduces three options per box and the puzzles begin to be more time-consuming and difficult.
As is sometimes the case with regular sudoku puzzles, however, it is occasionally possible to have more than one correct solution to a single sudoku puzzle. When this happens in a corner sudoku, it can prevent the whole samurai puzzle from being solved. Sometimes it is simply the reversal of a couple of numbers which causes the problem. Though the individual sudoku puzzle can be solved without any "errors," this alternative, "correct" solution is wrong in the overall scheme of the whole samurai puzzle. Puzzle addicts may be hard pressed to figure out how to avoid this problem, even when warned that all puzzles should be done in tandem and not separately.
I found nine occasions in which individual sudoku puzzles within the samurai puzzle had more than one solution--puzzles 12, 38, 46, 55, 65, 78, 79, 88, and 89. This was particularly frustrating in the more difficult and more time-consuming puzzles. The remaining 91 puzzles were clever and fun to do, however, and I've already bought, and look forward to doing, the next book in this series. Mary Whipple
Editorial Review:
Sudoku is the number-placing puzzle that is spreading across the world, engaging the minds of people of all ages. The rules are simple, you don't need to know any mathematics, all you need is logic. Samurai Sudoku puzzles are like traditional Sudoku puzzles but with five interlocking Sudoku grids. This book contains 100 of these massive puzzles, including solutions. All the Samurai Sudoku puzzles in this book are symmetric.
The rule is the same: Each row, column and 3x3 box in each puzzle grid must contain the numbers 1-9 only once. The puzzles start with a few easy ones for warming up, but the majority of the puzzles are hard and can take hours to solve.
This book is for those who feel ordinary Sudoku puzzles are too easy or too quick to solve and want more challenging puzzles. If you solve two of these every week this book will last you a year!
Have fun!
