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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.
Nikoli is the Japanese puzzle and game company that's been nurturing and developing Sudoku for over twenty years. They hold the trademark on Sudoku in Japan, and supply 100% of the puzzles published in Japanese newspapers and magazines.
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September 19, 2009: Unkike most computer generated sudokus, the Nikoli publishers use hand crafted puzzles. This, theoretically, is human on human. They seem to publish the most popular variety in Japan. The very difficult (the top level I have seen in their sales in the US, are purely logical. They do not require any advanced procedures (X-wing, Y-wing, coloring, etc.). The standard eliminations do the trick, but they are not easy.
For those who love the game, look for Nikoli publishing. They have an easier book, generally available, than the X-treme. You do get the feeling that you are trying to outthink a human, instead of a machine.Reader Rating:
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September 05, 2009: A pleasant use of intermediate Sudoku. For more extreme Sodoku try Black Belt Sudoku Level 9