The Master Theorem: A Book of Puzzles, Intrigue, and Wit

My smarter half enjoys all kind of brain-ticklers - puzzles, adventure rooms, math problems, mysteries. This book is the Champaign of all puzzle books. Most of the puzzles in this book are not easy, some require some knowledge one needs to Google (for instance we are both math majors but we still needed to google a certain - relatively well known to crypto-nerds - cypher for one of the puzzles). However everything makes sense in the end. Some puzzles can be solved in less than half an hour, others, well, you ponder about them over a few days. The hints make sense and give you just enough to give you a light nudge. If you like clever puzzles, this book is for you.

I love puzzles but I don’t want all the cookie cutter sudoku, crossword, or God forbid, word searches. I purchased several Mensa puzzle books thinking this would satiate my puzzle lust which it did at first but within the Mensa books there are really only 5 or 6 puzzle formats that get copied and changed throughout the book.That’s not the case with this book. This book has very different puzzle challenges and each one is different than the last! This will keep me occupied for awhile.

Okay so for me the most perplexing thing about this book is actually not necessarily the puzzles but the choice to have the hints encoded with a Caesar cipher, And yet if you flip a few more pages the very blatant solutions are laid out with no encryption or seal. I feel like the last section of the book that has the solutions should have been sealed behind some kind of wrapper that you had to break open. As it is right now you might accidentally flip to them even if you don't want to! I ended up putting a rubber band around the last section so I didn't inadvertently spoil the puzzles.Aside from that odd choice the book is good and the puzzles are challenging for sure. It's kind of expensive for a paperback though, and like I said I wish the solutions had been sealed somehow and I also wish the hints were just in plain text.

Bought this book for my daughter and she enjoyed it.

This book, and its follow-up, are absolutely fantastic. If you enjoy solving a variety of puzzle types, you will have a blast with this series. Make sure to submit your answers and track your progress on the website for maximal enjoyment.