X-Treme Sudoku

Product Review

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.

Customer Reviews

Average Customer Review

(12 customer reviews)

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful

It'll be hard to go back..., June 1, 2007

Tamara Mady (MN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: X-Treme Sudoku (Paperback)

...to computer generated sudoku after you start playing these. I don't know what it is, but somehow, these handcrafted puzzles don't only look so much cooler, they're actually funner!

The book comes with two levels of challenge - creatively titled "Difficult" and "Very Difficult." Even though I'm relatively new to these puzzles, I'd posit that the former really should be called "Moderate," using the standardly accepted levels of difficulty. My only gripe with the book is that I wish the page's measurements were bigger, but that's personal preference.

Nonetheless, this is a great buy with 320 puzzles, and it'll likely last you a long time!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

A great series of Sudoku books, August 19, 2008

Thomas W. Roth "twroth" - See all my reviews

This review is from: X-Treme Sudoku (Paperback)

The Nikoli books are really the best Sudoku books out there. They select puzzles which can be solved using logic rather than the really esoteric methods you can find out about on Sudoku web pages like X Wing and Swordfish. This tends to make them more fun because they are hard yet with enough effort can be solved. They also have a brief but helpful section with some strategy.
How many books have you bought which are half worthless because you don't enjoy working the simple puzzles any longer? Well, these books are specifically made with only the tougher puzzles so you get more fun for your money.
Otherwise the criticisms are true: it's a small book, which can be good since it takes up little space yet bad because you'll have trouble opening it very wide to write in since it's small and fat. If only they made it in a spiral format I'd give it 5 stars.
It probably has few reviews because they aren't sold everywhere but they 're worth the effort to find and certainly worth...Read more

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

Nikoli is the only Sudoku, February 14, 2011

Mark S. Millman (Point Roberts, WA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: X-Treme Sudoku (Paperback)

I've been addicted to Sudoku now for about four years and discovered the Nikoli series a couple of years ago. I've completed a few thousand Sudokus including all the Nikoli books: Original Sudoku One & Two, More Original, Expert, and X-Treme (twice now). They are a pure joy and obviously created by craftsmen whose wicked wit shows through. Nikoli Sudoku have made me laugh and wince. A simple puzzle might mean that you spend 30 minutes finding the first key and then the puzzle unravels or a hard puzzle may mean that you get the first dozen numbers immediately and are then stymied for half a day. Easy or hard, Nikoli Sudoku leave me feeling satisfied.

What frustrates me about other Sudoku books is the number of times a 'hard' puzzle is just hard because you are forced to trial and error endings, where you are stuck with no where to go and have to start trying to pick one of a pair in order to discover a bust. In a book like X-Treme Sudoku by Nikoli I might be forced to...Read more