HASHI: The Bridges Puzzle

by Alastair Chisholm

Hashi (short for Hashiwokakero, meaning "build bridges") is a new logic puzzle from Japan. In Hashi, the goal is to join islands together with up to two vertical or horizontal bridges, so that every island is connected. The larger in number value the island, the more bridges connect to it (an island of size 6 must be connected to 6 bridges), and no bridge can cross another. Successful logic puzzles have certain things in a unique game with one solution, easy to pick up, fun and challenging, able to be put down and picked back up again. Hashi has all these qualities, and puzzle master Alastair Chisholm has created 201 puzzles in three levels of difficulty--Easy, Medium, and Hard; you'll be thinking about them even when you're not working on them.

Genres: Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published October 31, 2006

About the author

Alastair is an award-winning children's author and puzzle creator. He's the author of the sci-fi middle-grade adventures ORION LOST and ADAM-2 , and children's picture books THE PRINCE AND THE WITCH AND THE THIEF AND THE BEARS and INCH AND GRUB, as well as books of Sudoku, Kakuro and other puzzles, including the Kids' Book of Sudoku and Kids' Book of Kakuro series.

Alastair lives in Edinburgh with his wife (who is lovely), two children (who are lovely but very loud), and a cat who is yowling at him even though there is clearly food in her bowl, look, it’s right there, *look*.

You can follow him on Twitter at @alastair_ch

Reviews

[Douglas Summers-Stay · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn't something to read, just a puzzle game I got years ago and just picked up recently. I've pretty much solved the game, but it's still entertaining. Each vertex in a fully connected bigraph is labeled with its degree. You can only connect vertically or horizontally. Your job is to fill in the edges of the bigraph. There are certain patterns which recur frequently, so you learn new theorems which are provably true that enable you to solve the puzzles more quickly.