Killer Sudoku 1: The Deadly New Dimension

La mayoría de sudokus son fáciles. Hay algunos más complejos en las categorías de tricky, tough y deadly, pero se pueden resolver todos.

I was hoping to be the first person to review this one, but it appears I'm a couple of days late. When I bought it, I was unsure about whether it'd be good or not because there were no reviews.ON KILLER SUDOKU:I had first encountered Killer Sudoku in Will Shortz's Favorite Sudoku variations. I liked it so much I wanted to get more. It may seem like Killer Sukoku is just some cheap knock off of the original, but I'd say it's what the original should have been. In fact, it'll probably make you bored of the original like it has for me. Killer Sudoku is so much more complex, and gives you a lot of oppurtunities to apply logic that don't exist in the original. It gets to the point in the original that to make them the most difficult, the puzzle solver must resort to the chore of possibility testing to figure it out. In Killer Sudoku there's a lot of tricks you can do involving the sum regions, and that keeps it interesting.Although regular Sudoku has numbers, it doesn't work with numerical values (the numbers could be replaced with letters or even meaningless symbols and you'd still be able to figure it out). In Killer Sudoku the numerical values are crucial to figuring out the puzzles; most of them give you no starting numbers and only give you sum regions instead.ON THIS BOOK:One of the first things I noticed was the Sudoku borders are in BOLD BLACK and that makes them easy to see. In Will Shortz's book with Killer Sudoku, the borders were lighter and less noticable, and I'd sometimes lose track of which 3x3 square I was in. What the first reviewer said about difficulty is mostly true. It rougly gets more difficult from puzzle 1 to 110, but I've found hard ones sooner than they should be and I found a lot of easy ones later than they should be. In fact, I found that the whole "Deadly" section wasn't any harder than the previous section. I really don't know how they came up with the goal times for these. For a few of them I finished in less than half as much of the goal time. For others I used much more than the goal time.I found puzzles 78 and 98 to be the two most difficult ones. Puzzle 78 has a number in a certain area that looks valid, but really it isn't if you look further. Without finding it, I don't think you can make progress. Puzzle 98 involved a sum region trick I had never needed to use before. It took me forever to think of it. I'm very certain you can't go on without figuring it out.

Hier sind die leichten Rätsel wirklich sehr leicht, so daß ich einige dann ausgelassen habe und meiner Tochter überließ. Die schweren sind dann richtige Knobeleien, mit denen man schon eine Weile beschäftigt ist. Die Zeitangaben sind zwar nicht ganz nachvollziehbar, 10 Min sind dann schon mal 3 Minuten und 60 Min sind dann schon mal 120 Min. Aber was macht das?!Wichtig ist: es knobelt sich nach den SudokuRegeln wunderbar!

I never get tired of this book. The vast majority of the puzzles are challenging but doable. There are a few that are a bit too easy, but they serve as a good warm-up. There are also a few I still struggle with. The killer variety of Sudoku is my favorite, and this is my favorite book of Killer Sudoku. I've gone through many other books, but none of them hold my interest the way this one does. It's almost as if the puzzles have a sense of humor. This is the best-crafted book I've found. I only wish there were more editions of it.

Very good buy.