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HomeSudoku BooksMonster Book of Japanese Puzzles: Masyu, Nurikabe, Hitori, Sudoku and Kakuro |
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| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review: ( 15 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 17 found the following review helpful:
 aggravating, and not in a good puzzled way... Feb 22, 2007
By Puzzler
I started this book with the Hitori section, which it seems was a big mistake. The "solutions" contain many errors. After doing a search online, I found that this had been acknowledged at the publisher's website: "From Michael Mepham: While all the hitori puzzles in the Monster Book of Japanese Puzzles and the Book of Hitori are valid, some of the published solutions are incomplete, leaving a final square or two unpainted. The error will be obvious to anyone who checks an erroneous solution, but for clarity we have reproduced all the solutions here, with corrections wherever necessary." [...]
My continuing complaint with this is that, while the reprinted solutions may in fact be valid (I haven't checked them) many of the puzzles do NOT, in fact have unique solutions. There may be 2 readily apparent alternatives, or even 3.
I've also found solutions in the Nurikabe section that are different from the "unique" solutions that Mepham has included in the book.
Hitori and Nurikabe are the 2 sections I started with, and the puzzles have been mostly entertaining...right up until the aggravation kicks in when you reach a different solution than the reportedly unique one, and you spend more time double-checking your work than you did doing the puzzle in the first place.
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
 Disappointed Dec 21, 2007
By Mary M. Agostini
As a hitori fan, I was very disappointed in this book. The reason I chose this particular book was for the hitori puzzles and they are all flawed. For those of you familiar with hitori, there are blacked out numbers with no reason for black out, and also circled numbers with no reason to circle. Leaves the puzzles unsolvable.
6 of 7 found the following review helpful:
this book is a mess May 20, 2007
By J. Weedon
I bought this primarily for the Nurikabe puzzles. After a while, I started getting a feeling of déjà vu. Turns out that the same few puzzles are used over and over. A real ripoff.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
Too many errors to be much fun Aug 26, 2009
By B. Walter
I enjoy various of the kinds of puzzles presented here, particularly Masyu. But about 10% of the puzzles in this book fail to have a unique solution, which every one of them is supposed to have, and after a while that becomes intolerable. There are other books that feature each of these kinds of puzzles, and I recommend that you buy those instead.
8 of 11 found the following review helpful:
1/4 of the book is useless Jan 09, 2007
By Christopher Heath
It is great to see more of Nikoli's puzzles becoming popular, and indeed the Masyu and Nurikabe puzzles in this book are great fun and are a refreshing change from the more standard Sudoku and Kakuro, which this book also contains.
Unfortunately, the author completely misunderstood how Hitori is supposed to work, so those 100 puzzles (1/4 of the book) are next to useless. When introducing and explaining Hitori, he states the rules correctly, but one hint he gives ("If a number is unique to both its row and column, then it must be white") does not follow from the rules. All of his Hitori puzzles do not work out unless you invoke this "hint". And some of them do not work out even if you do invoke it.
I give the book 3 stars because the other sections of the book have given (and still are giving) me hours of puzzle-solving enjoyment.
See all 15 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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