Puzzles Books

[...]I go to. I especially like that it includes victories over many top player, it features in-depth analysis of topical opening variations, all the analysis has been computer-checked and that it is also a manual of attacking chess, from one of the world's best authors.

This book contains 314 pages pure chess. A selection of John Nunns best games with in-depth analysis of each stage (opening, middlegame, endgame). And instead of just giving variations, you will find variations AND written comments showing the strategy and explaining the decisions. It is great to learn every stage of chess playing and chess psychology.

This book follows on from "Secrets of Grandmaster Play", which John Nunn previously co-authored with PC Griffiths, so it begins in 1985 when Nunn was already a world-class grandmaster. As he points out, the style is slightly different from the earlier book in being rather more personal and giving more psychological insights and anecdotes. The effect is to make it a more enjoyable read, if slightly less intense.

I have always thought of Nunn as a classical chess player, in that he studies the opening profoundly, seeks to gain advantage (or equalize) in orthodox - though vigorous - fashion, and also has great strength in the endgame. This combination of erudition and straightforwardness makes him a particularly good subject to emulate. These 40 games are annotated really deeply, although the opening analysis needs to be checked for new discoveries in the ten years since publication.

Perhaps the high point of this collection is Nunn's 25-move victory over Sokolov of the USSR at the Dubai Olympiad, 1986. Wiping a top Soviet player off the board so unceremoniously was something that British players hardly ever did until Nunn and Tony Miles came along. (They were usually happy to draw).

The openings reflect Nunn's fairly stable repertoire - assorted Black defences to his 1. e4, with quite a few Sicilians, and a high proportion of King's Indians as black. Unfortunately the book lacks an index, and the brief table of contents does not say what opening was played in each game. So there is nothing for it but to read methodically through from start to finish. Thanks to Nunn's exciting style and painstaking, literate notes - spiced up by the occasional amusing story - this is no sacrifice at all.

This book os loaded iwth great puzzles to keep your mind active

Are you fascinated by words? This huge puzzle book not only entertains, it expands the part of your mind that is underused in our visually oriented culture. Each puzzle briefly captivates your intellect as sometimes you unscramble a word instantly, and other times must appeal to the help of a friend. Better than crosswords, because there are no context clues, therefore a challenge for those who live the life of the mind. Now you won't have to wait for the newspaper each day, just buy this book! Your brain will love it.

I bought this as a gift for a friend and she loves it. The print is large enough for her and the Jumbles are just plain fun!

my mom always does the jumble in the paper so I got this for her. She was very pleased. In great condition.

I purchased this item as a Christmas gift for my sister who is a big Jumble fan. She loved it and claims that some of the jumbles are a bit of a challenge. The print is oversized for easy reading. A great gift for those hard to buy for also!!

...to play the JUMBLE, get this book! Bet you can't play just one. Good brain exercise. SKANTH (or THANKS, unjumbled)

I wanted to try to learn how to play Sudoku to keep my mind sharp. I tried in the past to learn and couldn't. I bought Sudoku puzzle magazines by Dell and Penny Press but couldn't figure out the rules on how to play.

I wanted to try to find a simple easy to understand book that had rules that i could make sense out of. I bought three including Sudoku For Dummies which was not much of a help and one with grids that had the alphabet around it. Again no help at all. Wasting all that money i almost gave up until i had and ingenious idea. Knowing that it's hard for me to learn certain things i decided i wanted to get a book that was written for children. That's when i found Kindergarten Sudoku.

I'm 50 years old and hesitated to buy a child's book but i figured i wanted the simplest easiest one i could find. Children learn from simple formats so i took a chance. I love this book. I was able to do 25 puzzles by the end of the day. By the end of the week i could do a Penny Press puzzle magazine with 9 grids. I was amazed. The rules are simple and they give you example puzzles to show you how its done.

They use numbers 1-4 then you work up 1-9. The book outlines the puzzles for you from easy to hard. There is also shapes and alphabet puzzles. I prefer the numbers but what i like is it's so easy to understand that if i forget how to do it, i just look at the book at a puzzle i did or do and easy one and it comes back to me.

If you ever wanted to learn how to play Sudoku but can't understand the rules, then get this book. You'll be doing them in no time and by the end of the week you'll be playing like you always knew how. I highly recommend this book for adults as well as for children. It's nice to find a book that explains it in plain simple english and really shows you how to do it. I give it 5 stars!

This is great for my 5 year old boys since they prefer number puzzles. Unlike other sudoku books for kids, this one has only 4X4 grids and uses only numbers. It also has different levels of difficulties.

The book is great for young kids. It is the only Sudoku book that I know of that has solely simple 4x4 puzzles. Although the puzzles are categorized as Easy, Medium, and Difficult, most of them are simple and easy to solve. Smart 4-year olds have solved many of the puzzles in the book. Children of 6 years of age solved most of the puzzles while 8-year olds can solve all the puzzles.

I strongly recommend this book for children as well as adults. One distinct feature of the book is the variety of Sudoku puzzles that are included. It even contains Sudoku puzzles with pictures of animals - dogs, cats, and fish.

My daughter and I had a lot of fun doing the activities at back of this book. The artwork is lovely enough to frame and put on a wall. The text is simple and engaging. A great book! Here's what my daughter said about it:

This book is about prepositions. Prepositions show where, when or how. I really like the drawings. They are so cute! The main character is Preppy the kitty. He reminds me of my cat, Casey. My favorite picture is the one where Preppy the kitty and his friend are sleeping together on the chair. I like this book because of the drawings and the word games at the end. Preppy made learning about prepositions fun. I think this book would be good for young children.

In Kitty Kerplunking: Preposition Fun, Reeg teaches children, in a light and fun way, the uses of prepositions. How does she do this? With the help of one very cute Kitty and his antics about the house.

Each page features an engaging, colorful illustration and a sentence showing a preposition.

For instance...

"Preppy the kitty ... pitter-pattered ON the piano keys."

Each time the preposition in the sentence is capitalized. At the end of the book there's a useful study guide as well as six pages of activities, including a criss-cross puzzle, word search, seek & find, and fill-in-the-blanks. This is the perfect book to introduce young children to prepositions.

--Mayra Calvani, Mayra's Secret Bookcase

Preppy the kitty in KITTY KERPLUNKING: PREPOSITION FUN is a huge success with the OASIS tutors. They have loved reading your story to their students and engaging them in language play using prepositions. Each page provides a rich visual and literacy experience for the students in a fun and lighthearted manner. Thank you for providing the instructional materials at the back of the book. These extension activities help to solidify appropriate practice for using prepositions. The study guide helps tutors understand the proper use of prepositions and how to interject them into student writing. I look forward to hearing more from the tutors and their experiences with the book. I also look forward to future books from one of Missouri's new authors.

Tamara Rhomberg
Coordinator
K-5 Reading Intervention, OASIS, Title I
Rockwood School District
St. Louis County, Missouri

This is the coolest way to play chess and the only way I ever want to play chess. The game is twice as long as regular chess but it is twice as fun! At first I never realy wanted to play chess anymore but whith Knightmare Chess I want to play chess all the time. Trust me you should diffinatly get it.

This is the coolest way to play chess and the only way I ever want to play chess. The game is twice as long as regular chess but it is twice as fun! At first I never realy wanted to play chess anymore but whith Knightmare Chess I want to play chess all the time. Trust me you should diffinatly get it.

My 11-year-old loves this game! He's been playing "regular" chess for a couple of years, but when an adult friend taught him to play Knightmare Chess he enjoyed the game so much that he spent his Christmas money to buy it for himself. He and his friend play several times a week. The game is different enough from chess that they still enjoy a "normal" game, once in a while, as well. Thanks for expanding the use of the chess board!

It took be back to when I was 10-13 years old. Simple, classic old school roleplaying.

Labyrinth Lord is a newly-released reissue of the rules from both the Classic D&D "Basic" and "Expert" rulebooks first released in 1981. This is the one rulebook you'll need to get started and the only one absolutely essential for play.

You get complete rules for character creation, equipment, spells, monsters, magic items, combat and adventuring, dungeon design, and more. All in just one 136 page book. I'd like to see AD&D or any of Wizards of the Coast's games say that!

If you love classic D&D and agree that simpler is better, this is the book for you.

I remember quite well that summer in 1981 when I first got the Dungeons & Dragons basic set. I saw the boxed set at a friends birthday party and wanted one for my own... thus begins a life-long joy of role-playing games.

Now, in 2008, there are no products to capture that wonderful feeling for the youth of today. Well, there WERE no products available. Enter Labyrinth Lord. Those who grew up with the simple and fun version of Dungeons & Dragons can now play what is probably 99% the same game.

I did not purchase this game for myself; I already have the same version of D&D from my childhood. I purchased this for my 11-year old niece for Christmas this year. I don't know if fantasy gaming will be a part of her life but THIS is the game to spark that interest in your young mind.

Fan makers now have a range of lace-making techniques and a profile of over seventy fans, with 20 patterns for making them, in Ann Coller's Lace Fans, which provides a narrowed focus on an unusual type of fan construction. Add a history of these fans, a discussion of different styles of lace fans, and insights on designs and patterns, and you have an invaluable and unique sourcebook packed with both patterns and color photos.

This book is an exquisitely photographed album of pictures and patterns of lace fans designed by Ann Collier. Many of the fans are in coloured lace and a whole range of techniques is used including needle and bobbin laces. Patterns are included for some of the fans but the book serves more as a breathtakingly beautiful album of Ms Collier's work. The patterns are also not for beginners and the instructions given require that you know what to do without a lot of detail.

I can still recommend this one as you will enjoy looking at the wonderful fans and wondering how on earth the author found time to make so many let alone design them all!

If you're a lacemaker, embroiderer, or simply appreciate great textile crafts you'll enjoy this book. Collier offers photographs and diagrams of an amazing range of handmade lace fans. Instructions are given for enough of them that a decent lacemaker could figure out how to make the others, or variations of them. A book to spur your creativity, or just put a smile on your face.

Well, or at least, think about it. This small little book by Smullyan is a fantastic collection of logic puzzles arranged in the increasing order of complexity & complete with solutions.

For those of you not intimately familiar with logic puzzles, Wikipedia provides a good definition. And interestingly enough, Smullyan's name & this book are mentioned in that very article. I cannot quite understand why such a book would be out print, but may be there are other ways of passing your time.

Back to the book. The great thing about a verbal puzzle, unlike a non-verbal one like Sudoku, is that there is a story behind it. So while both may be mathematics, if you get a Sudoku wrong - yes, well, nothing much happens. However, if a prisoner who has to deduce an escape route or die - now that's an entirely different proposition. So the "old-fashioned" story-telling continues - different situations, doctors & patients, sane or insane, vampire or human, the Isle of dreams & so on.

Even if you do not have the time yourself, I think this is still a great book to give a child. It is a fun way to learn Mathematics without realizing that you're learning Mathematics. And frankly, wouldn't you just love just love to say something that begins with "Elementary, my dear Watson"

S!

What a shame that this book is out of print. It is another of Raymond Smullyan's wonderful logic puzzle books; one that I found almost as challenging as To Mock a Mockingbird. Smullyan is a first rate mathematician, and it is quite a testiment to him that he is able to construct these logic puzzles that are both lots of fun to solve and also teach non-mathematicians how to think about serious logical issues. I found this book at a garage sale. Maybe you'll be lucky too!

I find it surprising that this book is almost unknown and out of print. This collection of logic puzzles is easily one of the best ever written. Starting with a small set of lighthearted teasers, continuing with progressively more serious problems, including probably the most complete variations on liar/knight and metapuzzle themes, and finishing with the best amateur level introduction to "serious" mathematical logic I have ever seen. The ideas are presented with amazing clarity and in the form digestible to the most casual reader, preserving the beauty but without compromising the essence of the arguments.

Don't let this one get away if you can find a copy.

Que decir de esta fantastica guia de The Phantom Hourglass, es una compra obligatoria que hay que hacer, y ahora que AMAZON lo pone a este precio!

A very, very thorough walkthrough. It's 300 pages long for a relatively brief game, and it really does leave "no stone unturned." Every rupee location, every collectible, every secret...all revealed.

Downside: can be a little disorganized. (For example, if you want to find out when to do the trading sequence, you'll have to find the right chapter and flip to it.) On the other hand, Nintendo guides always have the bare bones walkthrough first and then a "sidequests" section as an appendix. While I prefer the latter setup, it's no big deal. There's a huge series of checklists in the end of this guide for every ship part, gem, heart container...you name it.

Just like the Collector's Edition of The Twilight Princess Guide, this book is a lesson to all other player's guide manufacturers in lavishness!!! The pages are all lined with gold leaf & as soon as you open the book it just screams 'quality' at you. If you want a guide look no further than this & to add to the quality it's cheap too. Bargain!