Will Shortz Presents Puzzles from the World Sudoku Championship: 100 Wordless Crossword Puzzles

by Will Shortz (Introduction)

The sudoku craze is sweeping the nation! Puzzle-master Will Shortz presents 100 sudoku puzzles, from easy to hard, from the Second World Sudoku Championship in Prague.

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Will Shortz is an American puzzle creator, best known as the longtime crossword editor for The New York Times. A pioneer in his field, he holds the only known degree in enigmatology, earned at Indiana University. He began constructing puzzles in his teens and pursued his passion professionally with roles at Penny Press and Games magazine before joining the Times in 1993. Shortz founded the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament and co-founded the World Puzzle Championship. His puzzles and books have reached wide audiences, and he is also the voice behind NPR’s Sunday Puzzle. A dedicated table tennis player, he co-founded a major club in Pleasantville, New York.

Reviews

[Paul Weiss · Rating 3 out of 5]

A somewhat surprising disappointment!

Associated Press put it very well - "Hunched over newspapers on crowded subway trains, sneaking secret peeks in the office, a puzzle-crazy nation is trying to slot numbers into small checkerboard grids." No doubt about it! Sudoku is a mainstream craze and when people like me get fanatical about their puzzles, they undoubtedly get better and better at it. We're all looking for more and more difficult puzzles to challenge ourselves. Sudoku aficionados call their favourite puzzles "fiendish".

Wouldn't you think that a book entitled PUZZLES FROM THE WORLD SUDOKU CHAMPIONSHIP compiled by one of the best known Sudoku puzzle editors in the world would qualify as a compendium of exquisitely difficult fiendish puzzles? I know I did.

Well ... think again! This is not it! The regular Sudoku puzzles barely reach medium difficulty and, in most cases, I was able to solve the puzzles without even adding any intermediate notations. Now to the book's credit, the Sudoku variants are clever and, in many cases, quite challenging. In one particular case (called Ball Sudoku), I have as yet been completely unable to find the solution or, for that matter, even a method of beginning to find a solution outside of brute force elimination (and we all know that is not considered a particularly elegant method of solving a puzzle).

So what do we have here? In summary, 2 stars for the regular Sudoku component of the book and 4 stars for the variations. We'll call it 3 stars on average and provide the warning that if you don't care for Sudoku variants, then you'd better avoid the book entirely.

Paul Weiss