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.
