About the original 1000 PlayThinks,Will Shortz of The New York Times said it best: “The most wide-ranging, visually appealing, entertaining, gigantic collection of brainteasers since Sam Loyd’s Cyclopedia of Puzzles almost a century ago.” Inside The Big Book of Brain Games, you will find an obsessive collection of 1,000 challenges, puzzles, riddles, illusions—originals as well as must-do classics—it’s like salted peanuts for the brain. With jampacked pages and a full-color illustration for each entry, the book, opened anywhere, is a call to action. (And it’s guaranteed to make you smarter.) Twelve basic categories include Geometry, Patterns, Numbers, Logic and Probability, and Perception. An easy-to-read key at the top of each game ranks its difficulty on a scale of 1 to 10, while indices in the back cross-reference the puzzles. (You’ll find the answers back there, too.)
It’s win-win for the whole family: Kids love puzzles—and parents love their kids to love puzzles. Now from Puzzability—the premier puzzle-writing company whose mind-benders have appeared regularly in The New York Times and Disney Adventures, and repeatedly in The New Yorker and Martha Stewart Kids—comes a rich, original, and entertaining category-killer of a book with over 250 puzzles on every imaginable theme and subject.
Fully illustrated in color, here is a bonanza of mazes, word games, visual and logic puzzles, and more. With a full range of difficulty, but all totally solvable, the puzzles are not meant to be tests. In fact they’re engaging and humorous, as fun to work on as they are satisfying to solve. In Gray Matter, readers first solve a short crossword, then use the letters in the puzzle to crack a riddle. Hot Lines involves matching kids to their clothing—based on tan lines. Flea Circuit is an unusual maze that you find your way out of by jumping around the page like a flea. A scavenger hunt runs through the book—solve every puzzle to amass the clues and earn the bound-in certificate of achievement. (Yes, the honor system applies.)
Everyone loves Bananagrams! And everybody loves instant gratification. Putting the two together, master puzzle maker Joe Edley offers 10-Minute Bananagrams!— over 500 all-new puzzles that are designed to be solved in ten minutes or less. This is lickety-split Bananagrams, perfect for the train, the bus, waiting rooms, bank lines, for carrying wherever and whenever a Bananagrammer has just a few minutes to indulge the obsession.
With two difficulty levels—the easier one-half banana and trickier one banana—these bite-size puzzles are quick to solve and highly addictive. Ten lively, mind-bending puzzle types are featured, including Banana Peels (add letters to words, then anagram); Banana Pudding (extend two-letter groups into six-letter words); Bunch of Bananas (anagram one word into two smaller words); plus the brand-new Banana Bites, in which the solver anagrams a group of letters to complete a word. Supplementing the Bananagrams are fun banana facts, helpful word lists, and, of course, an answer key.
Joe Edley, the wordplay genius who created the puzzles in Bananagrams, now steps it up in More Bananagrams! by creating eight new joyously mind-bending puzzle types, and adding another level of difficulty—puzzles with a five banana (super hard!) rating. In all, there are over 500 original new anagram puzzles, including Banana Splits (solve letter substitution scrambles in rapid-fire fashion), Banana Peels (add new letters to words and rearrange to spell something new), Banana Boats (evolve a chain of words, one new letter at a time), intersecting words, vowel replacements, adjacent letter scrambles, and much more. The puzzles are rated one banana (simplest) to the fiendish new five banana, and enriching supplementary material is featured, including fun banana facts, helpful word lists, and, yes, an answer key.
Game of the Year winner at the 2009 International Toy Fair, Bananagrams is the international phenomenon that started with a simple idea: "An anagram game that is so fast it will drive you bananas!" Doing for letters what Sudoku did for numbers, it's the obsessive new puzzle craze that starts with 144 letter tiles in a banana-shaped bag and captures all the fun of crosswords and word games like Scrabble and Boggle.
Now comes Bananagrams! The Official Book, which translates the brain-twisting word fun of the game onto the page, and adds much, much more. Even if you've never dipped your hand into the Bananagrams pouch, the book stands on its own with hours of challenging play. Written by the only three-time National Scrabble Champion, Joe Edley, Bananagrams! offers sixteen clever puzzle types, including Banana Trees, where the object is to build word grids based on a theme; Banana Splits, a collection of four quick anagram puzzles to be solved in rapid-fire style; Banana Leaves, with its four-, five-, six- and seven-letter words; Banana Filling—what happens when you add a "K"?; and more. The puzzles have four levels of difficulty, from one banana to four bananas. Plus, there are glossaries; special strategies for Bananagrams: The Game; a list of "Weords"—weird words that are cool to play; two- and three-letter words to take your game to the next level; fun banana facts; and, of course, an answer key.
Word lovers will welcome the fourth book in the popular serieswhich has sold more than 100,000 copies! This time there’s yet another fun twist to the game: the answers are proper names or phrases, like Ypsilanti,” Sigourney,” Barcelona,” or Hemingway.” That raises the stakes and increases the difficulty. To solve the puzzles, which come in 9x9, 10x10 and 12x12, follow the basic rules of regular sudokuexcept using the letters appearing under the puzzle. Arrange them so that every letter appears in every column, row, and box just one time. When you’re done, you’ll discover an anagram buried inside the grid. But be warned: just because a word seems to be forming doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right one. A few traps await you!
