Editors of Nikoli Publishing – författare

Prepare to be obsessed. Match wits with the experts who created Sudoku. Arranged from “Easy” to “Very Hard,” here are over 300 logic puzzles that celebrate the compulsive joy of Sudoku with symmetry, smartness, and elegance—qualities lacking in computer-generated puzzles. It’s fiendish fun…every puzzle is designed by an author who anticipates your next step and obscurest the path, while never leading you into frustration.

The next step, like having a whole book of just Saturday Times crossword puzzles. Even more fiendish, even more fun, X-treme Sudoku proudly presents 320 puzzles rated "Difficult" to "Very Difficult." These are the toughest, knottiest, most demanding Sudoku out there—prepare to have your brain cells crackle, your pencils melt, your mind obsessed with numbers and squares. No one is better than Nikoli at rounding up such a collection. A Japanese puzzle and game company that started the Sudoku craze over twenty years ago, Nikoli is known for creating the only handcrafted puzzles around. As Tim Preston, publishing director of Puzzler Media, Britain's biggest seller of crossword and cryptogram puzzles, has said: "It is a matter of great pride to get your puzzle into one of Nikoli's magazines. Handmade puzzles are much better. . . . It gives you the satisfaction that you are pitting your wits against an individual who has thought about what your next step would be and has tried to obscure the path." For X-treme Sudoku, the puzzle-makers at Nikoli went out of their way to obscure the path. There are puzzles with entire boxes empty. Puzzles with whole rows left blank. Puzzles that form mysteriously beautiful symmetries, but demand a calculating logic to solve. For the X-treme solver, paradise.

Over twenty years ago Nikoli, the Japanese puzzle and game company, started publishing a curious logic puzzle called Sudoku. The rest of the world recently joined the Sudoku craze by using computer programs to create puzzles, but Nikoli is the only company that still crafts their puzzles the old-fashioned way: by hand. As Ad Age wrote in a profile, the Nikoli credo is “The Best Puzzles Are Made by Happy Employees.” And for solvers, it really does make a difference—there’s an elegance and symmetry to the puzzles, plus a sense of interaction. The puzzle-maker knows just when to encourage, and when to withhold. Puzzles marked “Easy,” are easy because the puzzler leads you through. Those marked “Very Hard” are exactly that—they pit your mind against the mind of the master, who seems to share the joy of that moment when one hard-won number is captured, and the entire puzzle tumbles into place. An obsessive’s collection, More Original Sudoku features over 300 puzzles, all in a chunky, easy-to-carry format (it even fits into a standard jeans-size back pocket). An introduction shows how to solve the puzzles at various levels of difficulty, and it includes a tutorial on how to create your own hand-made Sudoku. Here’s wishing you Gokouun o inorimasu! (Good luck!)