![]() ![]() I'm flattered to be at the second degree black belt level of something I've been at for about eight months. ![]() I like the martial arts metaphor of this series. I always start off hot and then hit a wall. But there is very little redundancy in the clues. These look like easy puzzles at first glance, lots of numbers filled in to start with. These books are also a good illustration of the fact that the number of clues filled in to start with is not directly correlated to the difficulty level of the puzzle. Nice puzzles, well constructed for those of you into symmetry (I'm not sure why you care, but I've seen your critiques of other sudoku books). But I got this book as a gift, a little retribution for all my tough Sudoku talk, and I will not back down. It's for this reason that I think I prefer sudokus that can be solved with logic alone (although some make the case that the trial-and-error guessing is just an extension of the logical steps you are taking in your head when solving simpler puzzles). The problem with these sudokus is knowing when to abandon logic and start muscling through. I find a box with only two options, and guess, write in a small 'A', and then follow it out to see where it goes, labelling the boxes with consecutive letters as I go so I can follow my steps backwards in retreat if necessary. Here's what I do: I start off with a pen, doing all the numbers that can be deduced through logic alone. But these are puzzles where you have to plug in numbers at some point and just see what happens. This seems to be just right to create tension and challenge me without overly discouraging me (again I refer you to Bandura's Self Efficacy theory). I'm working my way through this book and solving the puzzles successfully about 70% of the time. I don't know how they compare to the ones designated "Diabolical," I haven't attempted those yet. I think these are even tougher than the "Beware! Very Challenging" sudokus from the Will Shortz series. Be prepared to be challenged and love it! It may be just the thing I am looking for to keep me from having to erase and start over, or worse yet, re-grid the puzzle. I am going to look for more information on the solving techniques mentioned by others here. You may get lots of numbers at first but then - watch out, here comes the brick wall. Once I received this as a gift I began to solve the first puzzle and learned the secret. I thought it would be too easy so I put it down. I picked up the book and while leafing through it could immediately come up with quite a few numbers for spaces. One little quirk about this book actually caused me to pass it over while shopping in a bookstore. I don't immediately "see" numbers revealed - as my friend does - but I have a huge amount of patience and even work with a separate eraser which I need - often. If you want to move beyond the basic sudoku puzzle level, and past what others call "hard" or "challenging" this book will be a great find for you. I suppose if people must use all those unusual solving techniques that would explain why I am having to re-grid some of the time. I'm glad I read the other reviews posted here so that now I understand that these are different from the average sudoku. ![]() I was beginning to wonder why they seemed so much harder than usual puzzles. I just use dogged determination (and a pencil, now) and work at it until I'm done. I have never heard of any of the techniques mentioned here by other reviewers. The puzzles are, for the most part, quite challenging. Imagine my surprise when it was just my old friend the Number Place, only dressed up. Then I began to hear about this whiz-bang puzzle from Japan. I even ordered special books of Number Place puzzles directly from Dell. They were very good puzzles but not nearly as hard as this Second Degree Black Belt. I routinely solved all the puzzles in ink. Let the games begin! I have been solving these puzzles for about 10 years but at that time they were called Number Place and were contained in the Dell monthly puzzle magazines. I had complained to my daughter that a friend and I were tired of not being able to find any hard sudoku puzzles. My own big mouth got me in trouble and now I'm absolutely compulsive about solving the puzzles in this book. ![]()
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