The Little Book of Big Mind Benders

Book excerpt: Smart, addictive, challenging, fun, and good for the brain—here, in the irresistible 4" x 6" games format, are more than 450 truly satisfying, mind-expanding, full-color puzzles. It’s like salted peanuts for the puzzle aficionado and boot camp for the neophyte who wants to give his or her mind a workout. Created by puzzle master Scott Kim—a contributor to Games and Discover magazines—and adapted from the bestselling Amazing Mind Benders Page-A-Day Calendar, The Little Book of Big Mind Benders is a cornucopia of spatial puzzles, number challenges, wordplay, visual conundrums, and more. The puzzles are categorized by type but distributed throughout the book in a mixed fashion (i.e., a word puzzle next to a number puzzle next to a visual stumper). Readers can move page by page, working different parts of the brain—or easily find their favorite type of puzzle, going from easy to challenging. Test your knack for patterns with Dot Matrix. Put the pieces together in Assemblies. Deduce the secret word in Letter Swap, or untangle the mangled phrases of Lost in Translation. Plus discover cool twists on Sudoku, far-out ambigrams, Wordezoids, mazes, and number crunches. Answers are included in the back of the book.