I went to Barnes & Noble to buy a book and was bewildered by all the choices. In fact, I couldn’t even find them at first, because I was looking in Puzzles and Games, and they have their own separate section now.
Is there any difference between them all? It seems like half of them have Will Shortz on the cover, but this isn’t crossword puzzles so are they any better? What does a veteran player look for in a good book?
Nope, no significant difference amongst the books. The only differerence in difficulty is in number and placement of the set numbers – look to see if there are “enough” (whatever that means) puzzles at your preferred level of difficulty.
Frankly, I’d go to the dollar store and see what they’ve got – I know a major publisher of puzzle magazines (for whom I worked up until a month ago) supplies books for them.
The Sudoku book I got for Christmas claims that all of its puzzles are human-generated, not computer-generated, and gives some examples in the introduction where it shows why a human wouldn’t use some types of puzzles. I notice that all of the puxzzles have a symmetry to the clue numbers. That could easily be done by computer as well, but I suspect they really are using human beings.
If you want a very different Sudoku experience, see if you can get hold of the Boston Phoenix (Boston’s Reader-type former countercultural newspaper), or go to their website here:
and check out “Psycho Sudoku”, in which they give weird variations on Sudoku. The current one is a circular Sudoku, but they’ve done other ones where they don’t actuall give you the clue numbers, but they “circle” regions and give you the sum of the numbers inside, or that sort of thing. Weirdly different and compelling!
Well, I did see one featuring Happy Bunny. He appears in the margins, mocking you, telling you it’s ok to quit, or encouraging you to draw little bunnies in the squares instead of numbers.
A friend of mine sent me one, edited by, sure enough, Will Shortz. No different from any others I’ve ever seen, except for two 12 x 12 puzzles at the end. (Which, for some reason, skipped the number 10; they had 1 through 9, 11, 12, and 13. Seemed a little sloppy for Will.)
The one I have is in Czech!
And no, Will Shortz doesn’t appear mentioned anywhere.
Something to look out for is the size of the boxes in the puzzles and the kind of paper. Bigger boxes are easier to deal with for some, and an easily erasable paper helps, too. Other than that, some books have different levels of difficulty, which can be a good thing if you have widely varying levels of brain power and attention, like me!
The Bunny thing sounds fun…
I’ve done a fair few Su Doku, and I haven’t really noticed any differences - Fetchund makes some good points. I don’t really feel the need to buy a book since every newspaper (in the UK at least) seems to publish at least two puzzles per day! What I would say is go for a book with a variety of puzzles, like CalMeacham mentions - 100 identical Su Doku puzzles can get tiresome, and you’ll end up not getting full value from the book. Happy solving!
I have two of the Will Shortz books and they both use this numbering scheme, which leads me to think that it’s intentional. Although, for the life of me, I can’t figure out why.
Introduced by or edited by? I’ve got that book also. However do you edit a Sudoku puzzle, besides doing it and seeing if the computer generated difficulty seems right? In crosswords you can edit clues or even the grid if the constructor did something out of line, but sudokus are just numbers.