Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Worth waiting for, 4 Jan 2006
Yep, it's all Samurai Sudoku puzzles in this book. 100 of these giant puzzles that can each take an hour or more. Each puzzle consists of five interlocking Sudoku grids, and as far as I can tell, you can't solve the individual puzzles on their own. They are all symmetric and although most of the puzzles are quite difficult, the book does start off with a few easier ones...then it gets progressively harder. The book itself is a little bit bigger than other Sudoku books, so there is plenty of space to write in even though the puzzles are large. This is the only book I know with only Samurai Sudoku puzzles and a definite must-have for all Sudoku fanatics who want a bit of variety.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great fun, almost perfect entertainment., 23 Oct 2007
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 to do the puzzles 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, however, 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
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