Path Puzzles 3rd Ed.

The Path Puzzles book. If you enjoy logical puzzles like Sudoku but are bored of the basic filling-in-numbers-in-a-9×9-grid tedium, then check out this creative new puzzle type from Roderick Kimball. Use the numbers outside the grid (which ranges in size and shape from a simple 2×2 box up to a full-page monstrosity consisting of multiple sub-rectangles) to find your way from entrance to exit, as you would a maze. Just when you think you’ve figured out the basics, Kimball throws in a new twist: multiple entrances where you have to figure out which is the correct one, larger and more challenging grids, and even a bonus section with encrypted clues. The first puzzles are simple enough to hook anyone, but by the end of the book, even seasoned solvers will have found some challenges along the way. There is something for everyone here. The introduction and explanation of the puzzles, including sample solving strategies, is thorough and clear. The section headings contain quotations about paths and mazes. It’s not something you see in a typical puzzle book and it adds to the richness of the whole experience. This book is a great gift for puzzle-solvers. Just be prepared for some late nights, because this book is, as the cover says, hard to put down.

Author Biography

Roderick was born in BC, making him either ridiculously old, or simply Canadian. In his youth, Roderick was sometimes spotted on the slow end of a soccer pitch but more often on the fast end of a chess board. (Surely you’ve heard of the notorious Kimball maneuver, in which one opens a chess match by flipping the king’s pawn into the air such that it lands, butter side up, on the king’s fourth rank.) A curious child, Roderick once temporarily blinded himself by connecting his top and bottom braces with a 9-volt battery. Roderick has created puzzles for the National Museum of Mathematics, Games Magazine, Reader’s Digest Canada, NPR’s Ask Me Another and for his own amusement. In the other half of his life, Roderick has toured the world juggling with the Flying Karamazov Brothers. He also recently returned from Kenya, where he was sent by Engineers Without Borders to help folks with improving their water supply. He is proud to say that his ancestry includes two very great grandmothers who were executed as witches and he once made bottled water come out Rosie O’Donnell’s nose.