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HomeEverything ElseThe Official Book of Kakuro: Book 1 |
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| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review: ( 15 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
28 of 28 found the following review helpful:
 Excellent starting point Apr 17, 2006
By Thomas Hochmann
I made the mistake of starting out with /Kakuro for Dummies/. While that's an okay book if you want a random assortment of challenging Kakuro puzzles, it is a TERRIBLE beginner's book. All the /Dummies/ book did was make me feel like a complete idiot.
How is this book different? Simple. The puzzles are carefully arranged to teach you certain skills as you go along. Rather than saying, "here are the rules, and here's a billion random puzzles to solve," Tim Parker has picked an excellent selection of Kakuro puzzles with a nice progression to them. It is clear a lot of thought went into how new players will approach this book. Playing through the puzzles in order will indirectly teach you a great deal about how to solve Kakuro better and faster.
Good teachers will teach you by example, through experience, and by building confidence. Bad teachers (the Dummies book) will throw a bunch of facts at you and toss you into the deep end to fend for yourself. I prefer the confidence-building approach, and this book does an excellent job at indirectly teaching you to play Kakuro.
Highly recommended for newbies and my fellow victims of bad Kakuro books.
11 of 12 found the following review helpful:
 Lacking challenge and consistency May 19, 2006
By W. B. Dowler
Most of the puzzles in this book were satisfying. Three of the latter "Medium" puzzles are irritating: two lack unique solutions (for example, the answer key has "3 1" immediately above "1 3," which is impossible to logically distinguish from "1 3" directly above "3 1") and one is actually invalid (the answer key has "2 1 2" as the solution to one "word," and there's no other way to solve it, as the three cells in question must add up to 5.) The other 147 puzzles in this collection are free of such errors. My only other grumble is about the difficulty; I did not notice a significant difference between the difficulty of the medium puzzles and the first 40 hard puzzles, though the last 10 hard puzzles were a significant step up from the first 40. Even the hardest puzzles are not as difficult as those in the Virgin books. I'd recommend this to people who are looking for a first experience with Kakuro, but those with experience with other publishers might want to look elsewhere for additional challenge.
6 of 6 found the following review helpful:
 A good starter . . . Apr 03, 2006
By L. L. Stallings
I found this to be a good book to start on, not because of the introductory text, but because the easy section was designed to teach specific strategies. When I began the medium section, I found I really needed a chart of the ways to make each sum with different digits. I began developing my own before finding nicely designed ones in Gareth Moore's The Essential Book of Kakuro. Timothy Parker's book's paper quality, binding, and book size are all effective. I'll buy Book 2 when it comes out.
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
For beginners Mar 03, 2010
By H. Kahl
I give this one three stars only because there aren't many Kakuro books available. Sudoku on the other hand has probably a thousand. Go figure. Kakuro is a more interesting puzzle in my opinion. Anyway, in this volume the so-called "Hard" puzzle are fairly simple. Most of the puzzles easy section can be solved about as fast as you can write in the numbers. There is one glaring error I found where a puzzle has at least three solutions. The Black Belt, Brown Belt, etc series and the Mensa Kakuro books are much better. All that being said, it probably is a decent beginner book.
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
Great book for those who solve Kakuro using Logic Jan 21, 2008
By J. Wilson
"Golem"
I hate Kakuro books where you are suppose to guess "wildly" and cannot be solved through pure logic. This is NOT one of those.
So puzzles might seem less challenging to people who like to use "trial and error" but, for the rest of us, it has plenty of challenging situations that can be solved logically.
It does include some puzzles with more than one answer. So I can't give it 5 stars. But, on the other hand, I haven't found one that doesn't.
See all 15 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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