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American Mensa Books
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101 Checker Puzzles
Robert Pike
One, two, three, and you've made a triple jump and shut down your opponent's game! Winning checkers isn't always as easy and quick as that, of course, but figure out the logic behind these 101 brilliant strategies and you will come out ahead every time. Divided into beginning, middle, and endgame tactics, this great book of checker challenges will hone your skills and your analytic powers. Each puzzle showcases a different board layout, with a description of what's happening: for example, "Black Flabbergasts White" reveals that very early in the contest, Black is about to make a move that will assure almost instant victory. Put yourself in the player's place and try to fathom what this stupendous, game-clinching move could be. If you're having trouble, there's a tip at the bottom of the page, and a solutions section. With American Checker Federation rules, a checker glossary, and a very special extra: a fold-out checker board!
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Winning Ways
Andrew Brisman
Walk away from every casino a winner! Here's the inside line on the games and bets that give the best advantage. Do you know whether to split a pair of aces in blackjack, which slot machines carry the worst payback, why losses are more significant at video than live keno, what is the bread-and-butter bet in craps, and if bluffing in poker really works? Beat the bank by understanding odds and probability, the house edge, money management, and the psychology of gambling.
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Card Games for Smart Kids
Margie Golick, Ph.D.
Card games are great fun--and learning new games can magically enhance kids' skills! To play a game, children must master rules, develop mental strategies to compete successfully, understand the objectives, evaluate their own (and their opponents') strengths and weaknesses, learn routine procedures and probabilities, keep track of the goings-on, and make long-range plans. Plus, games force them to respond quickly and to deal socially with others. Try out activities that stress language skills and reading, number concepts, and divergent thinking.
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Challenging Brainteasers
Bernardo Recaman Santos
Puzzle these out! Math and logic become more fun than ever when they're turned into brainteasing games. Some of these puzzles use cards or marbles; others have diagrams, grids, and lively illustrations; still more present their questions as a story or riddle. Here are just two examples: Look at this sentence: Dale is wrong. Using all these letters, can you spell a single word? Or, try Non-aligned Pawns: How must the 8 white and 8 black pawns in a chess set be placed on a board so that no three pawns end up in the same horizontal, vertical, or diagonal line? They'll really test your smarts!
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Crosswords for Kids
Trip Payne
Do you know the three-letter word for a female sheep or the four-letter name of Dr. Frankenstein's assistant? Try your hand at crossword puzzles that give hours of challenges and amusement. They're filled with words for things that kids know a lot about--games, food, school, sports, music, geography, and so on--and they vary in difficulty. Some clues are answered with one short word; others need two. If you get stumped, check the back of the book for answers! 96 pages, 5 3/8 x 8 1/4.
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Cryptic Crosswords & How to Solve Them
Fred Piscop
Uncover the secrets to solving these tricky puzzles and then test out your newfound skills on some of the toughest examples you've ever seen! For the first part of the book, in-depth, step-by-step notes and annotations explain how to solve each type of clue. Learn how to recognize flags signaling hidden words, anagrams, charades, homophones, reversals, containers, deletions, and double definitions. Practice on the samples where the clues may appear to make sense on the surface, but dig deeper and you'll see that each one has at least two meanings. Once you've grasped cryptic logic, try the real thing with 19 increasingly difficult, bigger puzzles.
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Great Word Search Puzzles for Kids
Mark Danna
Question: You're not at a loss for words, you just can't find them! What are you doing? Answer: You're working on challenging word search puzzles. Every puzzle has a theme and includes a series of related words hidden among a grid of letters. All you have to do is look for them. Are the words spelled vertically, horizontally, or diagonally? Don't forget to check backward as well as forward. Now, here are some more words: provoking, stimulating, and entertaining. Together, they describe the awesome puzzles in this collection.
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Hard-to-Solve Brainteasers
Jaime & Lea Poniachik
The solutions to these tantalizing teasers take common sense, not great knowledge. Meet a strange collection of humanity: the harem of the Great Tamerlane; Englishmen stranded on a desert island; the twins Peter and Paul, one of whom always tells the truth and one who always lies. Take on the fiendishly frustrating Hidden Words and Secret Numbers, and play dominos with no dots. Hints and clues are available along the way, and so are the answers.
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Hard-to-Solve Word Puzzles
Henry Hook
And the word is...challenging! These clever word games will really make your brain work overtime to come up with the solutions. Each one has a little twist, something unusual to keep crossword and other puzzle lovers on their toes. Around and Abouts will get heads spinning and searching for the letters that fit in a circular grid; around answers go counterclockwise, while the about clues overlap them in a clockwise fashion. Work it out from Tops to Bottoms, where two letters fit into every square; Crushword also crunches several letters--sometimes more than four--into each grid. Answers to Weavers clues form a continuous chain, with the first letter fitting into a central starred space; the next four go into adjoining numbered spots. The rest shuttle back and forth across and around the diagram. Plus: Quadrants, Crazy Eights, Catching Some Z's, Siamese Twins, Honeycombs, and other great puzzlers!
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Ingenious Puzzles for Word Lovers
George Bredehorn
It's a language lover's delight--a tempting variety of intriguing word puzzles. And, almost none has traditional clues, so you won't face those weird words that pop up in everyday crosswords. Complete mini-grids that already have all the vowels, but need two consonants (repeated as often as necessary) to fill in the blanks. Test your skills on Split Decisions, Anagram Loops, Mixagrams, Fraze Its, and other unique inventions. You won't go back to ordinary crosswords again!
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Match Wits With American Mensa: Test Your Trivia Smarts
Peter Gordon
Calling all trivia buffs! Compare yourself to the cream of the crop as you field the same questions that were sent to members of American Mensa with an interest in trivia or puzzles. The percentage of members who got the question right is given along with the answers. Pit your IQ against theirs in five different categories: Movies and Television; Music, Arts and Letters; Sports and Games; Places; and History and Science. You just might find out that you're a trivia genius!
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Mensa Math & Logic Puzzles
Dave Tuller & Michael Rios
Join the ranks of the geniuses, and leave behind the merely brilliant! Try to figure out 20 tough types of puzzles like the ones found at international puzzle competitions. These are puzzles that require no verbal skills to solve; you just need your logical brain. How hard can they be? Simple arithmetic and a sharp pencil (with a full eraser) are all you need, plus paying close, close attention. Start by following twisting paths made by worms crawling across triangular grids. Then forecast weather patterns by detecting rain cloud patterns in a numbered diagram. Find lost fleets of ships in grids where only a few different shapes are visible. Rearrange dominoes according to a diagram (problem is, the edges of the tiles have been removed). More fun awaits you with hex loops, skyscrapers, lighthouses, and other suddenly fiendish objects. 96 pages, 8 x 10.
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Mighty Mini Crosswords
Trip Payne
Don't be fooled by their size! These 60 miniatures, created by a puzzle-maker whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Games, contain mostly short words, but they're tremendously challenging. Some clues involve hard trivia about a wide variety of subjects; others match easy words with hard synonyms; still more involve tricky plays on words. A few are actually easy--just to keep you off balance!
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Mighty Mini Cryptic Crosswords
Henry Hook
These mini puzzles are mighty challenging! If you've done only traditional crosswords, these cryptics will work out some new mental muscles. What makes them different? The clues themselves don't appear to make sense on the surface. That's because each one has two parts: a straight definition, and a cleverly hidden bit of wordplay (like an anagram, a charade, a homophone, a reversed word, and more). For example: Earthworms wiggling in Pennsylvania school (10) is SWARTHMORE (an anagram of EARTHWORMS). These 60 stumpers from cryptic master Henry Hook elevate crosswords to a new level!
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Mighty Mini Crypto-Quotes
Leslie Billig
Become a word detective! With these quotations in code, each letter of the quotation has been replaced by another letter. See how quickly you can decipher the code and figure out the quote. When you get really good, you only need to figure out a few letters. But beware, they get harder as you go along. 160 pages, 4 3/16 x 5 1/4.
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Mighty Mini Mind Bogglers
Karen C. Richards
They're small, they're tough, and they'll challenge your mind. Each of these word, logic, math, and visual puzzles is sure to make you scratch your head in wonder and amazement. Test your skill by finding the four-leaf clover and a perfect star, get the high score in a pinball game, decipher a joke and its punchline written in code--they'll dazzle your mind and challenge your intellect.
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Mighty Mini Rhyming Picture Puzzles
Steve Ryan, illustrated by John Ottinger
It's rhyme time--but the puzzles are in pictures, so you'll have to translate them into words! Every lively illustration, filled with fun details, has a visual rhyme hidden inside. For example, imagine a fire-snorting creature who's having a great time racing a four-wheeled child's vehicle: if you've figured out that it's a dragon wagon, then you've solved the puzzle!
Look closely at this picture? See that twister in the back? And the familiar dog? Are you thinking of The Wizard of Oz? You're on your way to the answer. If you're having trouble, there's a hints section where you'll find the first letter of each word in the rhyme. But, look at it only if you must!
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Nearly Impossible Brain Bafflers
Tim Sole & Rod Marshall
If you answer all 167 of these tricky number, word, chess, logic, and spatial games, you must be impossibly smart. Try to decipher a Top Forty song chart, decide whether you'd rather a tiger chase you or a zebra, and much more. Answers are provided.
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Play Cribbage to Win, Official MENSA Game Book
Dan Barlow
It's a race around a board that takes luck and skill--and if you're hoping to reach the finish line first, here are the rules, the skill-building quizzes, and the cleverest tactics needed to win. If you've never played before, you'll get an explanation of the game's basics and scoring--who goes first, dealing and discarding the cards, and moving the pegs, all with expert tips to put beginners on the right track from the start. The detailed coverage focuses on such topics as what to do when the cut is irrelevant (when the dealer will lose if he doesn't peg out); strategies in the play of the hand; ways to speed up the game; and almost any potential situation you'll encounter. And, for those who already play, there's some advanced advice to take you to the next level, plus information on the American Cribbage Congress, which runs tournaments and clubs. 96 pages, 5 3/8 x 8 1/4.
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Play Winning Checkers
Robert Pike
A book for both beginning and advanced players. Pike points out the benefits of this multigenerational, all-inclusive, interactive game and recommends it to improve concentration and the ability to deal with complex situations. Early pages discuss the history of this ancient game. 'Part Two' is devoted to strategy and tactics and offers over 50 easy-to-follow diagrams on plays at the beginning, middle, and closing of the game, and pitfalls such as the 'doghole.' Advice for setting up a checkers tournament (including a sample scorecard and schedule) and 'Rules' of Play and Laws for Standard American Checkers...conclude the volume. The back cover folds out to become a board with numbered spaces so readers can follow along with the diagrams and the spiral binding makes the book easy to consult.--School Library Journal.
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Quick-to-Solve Brainteasers
J.J. Mendoza Fernandez
You'll figure out the answers to these 187 logic puzzles and riddles once you catch the tricky wording. Take this dare: My bird can fly faster than any supersonic plane. Here's how: If you put my bird inside any plane and make it fly in the same direction as the plane, it will go faster than the plane. The name Mensa speaks for itself. This is for the ultimate brainiac, or those who enjoy intensive mental workouts.--Chicago Tribune.
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Word Search Puzzles for Kids
Mark Danna
Show off your smarts on sports, music, famous people, TV shows, and dozens of other subjects. Try all 56 puzzles and find the hidden words that are written left to right, right to left, up, down, and diagonally. Test your wits on school stuff, camp fun, words with the letter X, horror movies, Internet terminology, outer space, dinosaurs, and more. Each puzzle has a slightly different style, but all come with jokes, little-known facts...and the answers!
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