Will Shortz Presents Ferocious KenKen

My husband and I are Kakuro addicts - we buy our puzzle books in pairs so we can "race" as we do each puzzle. Unfortunately, a high percentage of what's out there is just not challenging enough for us, and we've worked our way through all the challenging ones we can find. So I thought this might be an acceptable alternative, and bought a couple of copies. I'm pleased to report we've enjoyed the challenge of wrapping our mind around new type of arithmetic number logic. The puzzles are smaller and simpler than our favorite kakuro puzzles, but the puzzles are more complex because they include operations other than addition, so it's stretching some different brain-muscles. They start fairly simple (6x6 grids) but increase in size in difficulty later in the book.

First off let me say that as a math professor, having students, especially young ones (maybe 2nd or 3rd grade) do kenken would be the best way to teach them "number sense". That is what motivated the invented of Kenken.About this book specifically, all the puzzles are a good challenge for me. They are definitely not for beginners and make sure you have a good eraser to work them with. They take me awhile, but they are doable for the experienced but not crazy ken ken puzzler.

If you're good at kenken, you will find that these are definitely not "ferocious". Many of them can be done just about as fast as you can write down the numbers. There were only a handful that had me stumped for any length of time. But good puzzles, nonetheless.

Full of family fun

All of the puzzles are the same, with plus, minus, times and division in each puzzle. We prefer a puzzles without all four functions, so none of them are what we like best. Also, the newsprint pages don't allow the erasures necessary to reorganize lines and columns as one goes along, as well as slicker paper would. Because we haven't completed our older, preferred book, this one is still unused. Being a Will Shortz presentation, however, I'm sure we'll enjoy them when we get over our disappointment.

I do these puzzles online and I like to have a book of them to help pass the time when I'm on airplanes. This book is particularly good because there are no easy puzzles in it.

So far I've solved #s 1, 5, and 7. I consider myself advance. I can do 9X9 and I try not to use hints when solving, even with 9s, and depending on the puzzle I can keep the numbers straight without hints. I've been playing KenKen for about two years now. This book is going to last a while. Just know going in that it's going to be HARD. They meant the Ferocious part. This is going to be challenging even for advanced players.

The KenKen in the newspaper is way to easy now that we've progress in our KenKen solving skills with this book. It's been a great challenge!