Review: Challenging fun for the whole family
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 11 16, 2012
I tried my first Puzzlebook a little more than a year ago, and I've played most of the ones that have been released since then, and I still love the challenge of solving the puzzles. Like the earlier Puzzlebooks, "100 Puzzle Quizzes" is a single-player collection of mind exercises/brainteasers with no time limits, so there's no pressure to solve a puzzle unless you want to set your own time limits.All of the one hundred puzzles are visual. I started with #1, and as I advanced, the difficulty of the puzzles gradually increased. I didn't have too much of a problem solving the first dozen or so puzzles, but they became progressively more challenging, and with some of them, my first answer was incorrect (you can keep guessing until you get it right). The first puzzle that gave me a problem was #6 - Wire Signs, but once I understood how the "Wire" puzzles worked, I was able to solve the later ones. One of my favorite puzzles was #25 - Bird Totem Pole. You could solve this with some geometry and basic mathematics, but take a shot at it using only deductive logic for a simpler but more elegant answer. The puzzles don't have to be solved sequentially - you can begin anywhere and work in any order. The solution pages show very clearly what the correct answers are and the logic behind the solutions.The puzzles included a number of different types, most of them fitting into the categories of visual, spatial, counting, geometry, matchstick, coins, searching, and deductive logic. I've seen similar types of puzzles on IQ tests, so these would be great practice for such a test. I know very little about the functioning of the brain, but I think these puzzles will give your logic circuits a pretty good workout.I worked the puzzles on my Kindle Fire HD tablet. These are the same puzzles that are in "100 Puzzle Quizzes (Interactive Puzzlebook for E-readers)," but they're in color, and they're intended for devices with color touch screens.As much enjoyment as I had with "100 Puzzle Quizzes," I'm really looking forward to turning some of my whiz kid nieces and nephews loose with the puzzles some rainy day. They've worked several of the Puzzlebooks, and they love solving the puzzles as much as I do.