Publisher's Synopsis
Great fun to solve, either alone or with friendsEvery puzzle in this book is a stimulating mental treat, and solving a set of puzzles is something that is fun no matter how many people are involved!This book helps you develop lateral thinking skills, in addition to word game skillsEvery one of the 150+ puzzles in this volume can be attacked in different ways. You might be stuck for upwards of ten minutes, staring at a stubborn combination of letters that refuses to divulge its secrets and rearrange itself into a regular dictionary word. But you can always tackle the problem from a different perspective; whether it is a short break that allows your mind to recharge its batteries, or the use of pencil and paper to write down the word with a different initial arrangement of letters (with 5-6 different initial arrangements to stare at, you will almost always be able to guess the final answer) or the use of patterns like common word endings or common word prefixes, you will always be able to use lateral thinking to make each problem more tractable. When you come to the end of the book, your mind would have experienced a thorough workout, and you will exercise mental muscles that might not have been stretched in many years.It's not that hard! It starts off easy, and gets progressively more difficultThe last thing you want from a book of word games is excessive difficulty. This book balances difficulty levels expertly; some clues are of the strictly popcorn variety; they feature shorter words that you have to unjumble, and you can expect to guess their answers in a few seconds. Yet others are frustrating but not overly so: a minute of serious thought, and / or resorting to writing down the letters in a circle and squinting at them will help you see an emerging pattern in time. Only about 10% of the clues are so difficult that you will need time, coffee, the assistance of a friend, a computer program, or divine intervention. All jokes apart, you will be able to have fun with this book whether you're a novice or an expert.A perfect introduction to the world of word gamesIn English alone, there are thousands of different word puzzles that the fertile minds of human beings have invented over the millennia. This book features the most intuitive of puzzles; a simple rearrangement of the letters of a word. The simplicity of the concept belies the difficulty of solving every single such puzzle; your brain can often be tricked by a completely different arrangement. Of course, one sure way to solve every clue is to rearrange the letters into four or five different sequences. Once you look at a particular set of letters in many different ways, your brain breaks through its initial misconceptions and is able to guess the correct answer much more easily. This is also, then, one of the most fair word puzzle types: given infinite time, you will always be able to guess the correct answer. The challenge is to complete the solution in a reasonable amount of time, and to keep refining the time until you're a lean, mean, word-gaming machine.
