The Times Super Fiendish Su Doku Book 1 (Times Su Doku)

Notice the other two reviews (as of this writing) are from people who gave the book as a gift, not people who play sudoku. I do the puzzles, and rate the book two stars because they are not "super fiendish" and in fact are pretty easy.They do NOT require any special techniques to solve, such as Swordfish or X-Wing etc. Just basic logic.That said, they are not trivial. You'll need to make notes in many of the squares to indicate possible positions, and be familiar with some of the basic logical techniques (such as matching pairs of numbers to eliminate those numbers elsewhere in a given row/column/box.)I'm an intermediate-level player and these take me about 10 minutes each to solve.These are somewhat easier than Frank Longo's difficulty level 2, if you've tried any of his (excellent) books. His level 3 and 4 books are much, much more difficult than the puzzles in this book.REGARDING FORMAT: There is only one puzzle per page, which is great -- so you have enough room to write small notations in the squares. However it's not a large book, and the margins around the puzzles are pretty wide, making the puzzles smaller than would be ideal -- not as large as some of those that I've played on spiral-bound books, but big enough. Being a paperback, it doesn't open up as nicely as a spiral book, and the paper is newsprint quality rather than the nicer, whiter typing-paper quality found on some other sudoku books.If you are a beginner looking for something a bit more challenging, then this could be a good next step for you. However the Frank Longo Level 2  Absolutely Nasty Sudoku Level 2 book would be a much better choice, because it's inexpensive, spiral bound, has larger puzzles, and is printed on large high-quality white pages.I give this book the two-star rating because the title is VERY misleading, and the paper size/quality is relatively poor.

Great Su Doku book. It's up there with the NY Post's Lethal Su Doku. I purchased this as a gift for a family member who is very happy with it. He is an expert at Su Doku and needs more challenging books like this one.

Ordered for my husband who really enjoyed doing the puzzles.

This is a very good book of puzzles, but they are not really as difficult as Super Fiendish suggests. Nearly all can be solved using just Claims, some contain Gordonian Rectangle short cuts, one puzzle even contains two. A couple are solved using Forcing Loops, some with Forcing Chains. None appear to require any more advanced techniques, although I have still to finish a couple that didn't complete.The Times series of Fiendish and this series of Super Fiendish Puzzles are quite well made and give just enough room in each cell to write all candidates, provided that you write very small. It's a shame that none of the Times publishers actually do Su Doku. If they did then they would spread each puzzle out over more of the A5 page. They might even consider a hard cover version so that both odd and even pages could be easily accessed.I look forward to additional books in this series.

Love 'em!

excellent

Very good

Some of them are very difficult, but others not so, I'm told.