If you enjoy to tease your mind with picture, logic, or sudoku style puzzles and enjoy pencil to paper action, Alpha Books brings you The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Picture Puzzles, Volume 2, Puzzle Baron’s Sudoku and Puzzle Baron’s Logic Puzzles, Volume 2. These three brain-challenging books include a variety of puzzles for beginner through expert solvers. If the puzzles prove too difficult, there’s an answer key in each book to help.
Puzzle Baron’s Sudoku $9.95
Puzzle Baron’s Logic Puzzles, Volume 2 $14.95
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Picture Puzzles, Volume 2 $10.95
Julie’s Take: My family and I were given the opportunity to play with all 3 puzzle books. I love that the books are small enough to take along with you wherever you go! We took ours to dance, a swim meet, and I kept the Logic Puzzles Vol. 2 in my car for when I was waiting to pick up my children from school. All three books offered great ways to pass the time and were enjoyed by all ages. The books all have different sections for varied difficulty. This was great because my twin 7 year olds could work the easier puzzles (the Picture Puzzles were their favorites), but my 9 year old could do the medium puzzles or work with her sisters on them. 
It was definitely a popular book, and almost all the Picture Puzzles have been solved! My 12 year old enjoyed the Sudoku book and was definitely challenged by the medium and hard puzzles. The book does claim to have a tutorial on strategies to solve the Sudoku puzzles on the Puzzle Baron’s website. We were unable to find it for extra help, so we referred to the puzzles answer key in the back of the book if we got stuck. It didn’t keep us from enjoying the puzzles; we just thought we’d get some secret stealthy tips to help us out.
The Logic Puzzles were what I found really fun to do! I had never tried these types of puzzles before. You are given a scenario and then a number of clues. Using a logic grid provided, you have to use logical deduction from the clues to solve the puzzle. This usually involved figuring out relationships between items and/or people (i.e. matching up 4 different people to 4 different pets and figuring out which of 4 names goes to the 4 pets). As the Logic Puzzles get harder, the grids get larger. You can also give yourself a pat on the back if you solve the puzzle faster than the average Joe, which is provided for you on each puzzle.
I would definitely recommend these books as fun and challenging puzzle books. Our family has enjoyed them and they had something to offer everyone in our house of 6, which is hard to do!
Julie is a new writer to Jen is on a Journey, about Julie: I’m a 41 year old (and yes that seems old) SAHM, independent demonstrator with Uppercase Living, a self-taught artist/crafter (whichever term you want to put with what I create), and former social worker. My life revolves around myself, husband, son (12), daughter (9), and twin daughters (7). That makes 6 to keep up with! We have an active family who loves the outdoors, scouting, swimming, and volunteering. You can find me at http://juliecorrigan.
We were sent books in exchange for honest review, all opinions are our own.
