Unofficially More Varied than Other Variety Puzzle Magazines

When given a choice, I generally prefer standard small format puzzle magazines to full sized options. Unfortunately, most of the types of puzzle magazines I prefer only come in the larger, less wieldy format. When Kappa changed its Official's Variety Puzzle title to a small format magazine, I immediately supported their decision by purchasing it. It's now one of my first choices when I'm looking for variety puzzles.

The format has a lot to do with that, but I'm also very pleased that the magazine tends to have a large selection of puzzle types and that the puzzles are often slight variants of the usual suspects you find everywhere else or even entirely new puzzles types I've not seen elsewhere at all. On the down side, some of those changes are a bit disconcerting at first and one or two are not entirely to my liking. That said, some of the variants are more enjoyable than the puzzles they're generated from. Many of the word puzzle variants involve placing letters into provided words in some way to form new ones. For example, Interweaves gives you five letters that you have to place in some order amid the letters already placed to make viable words and Double Duty has you add three letters in the middle of provided word fragments to make separate words out of the preceding and following letters (FRU _ _ _ LOP leads to FRUGAL and GALLOP when you add GAL to the provided fragments).

Official's Variety Puzzles also includes a lot of standard puzzles, but you may not realize it at first glance because they tend to use their own names for puzzles that don't match up to those used by Dell or by Penny Press (when those names differ from the Dell names). Some of those puzzles are much simpler than you'll typically find elsewhere, but in general puzzles here are more difficult than I expected. In particular, the many word puzzles tend to either be surprisingly easy or quite a bit harder than they appear at first glance. For example, the 26-Skiddoo (Kappa's name for the puzzle where you put all 26 letters down a column of seemingly random letters to make words across the missing letter) is amazingly easy. Many words you create are 3-5 letter words and many of the missing letters start or end words. Words are also more common than those often used in this puzzle elsewhere and many of the spaces only support one letter right off the bat. I can almost look at the puzzle and write in all of the correct letters at first glance. This same type of puzzle usually requires limiting down from four or five possible rarer words in many rows until you find the only viable unique combination of letter usage that generates legal words in all 26 rows.

The puzzles are almost entirely a mix of word puzzles and logic puzzles with a higher concentration of word puzzles than anything else. There are a few math puzzles and a few puzzles of other sorts, but I wouldn't buy this magazine if you don't like word puzzles.

The magazine has several very simple logic problems generally only using two or three sets of variables without much ordering and almost no cross checking of any sort. This may be one of the negative consequences of the smaller format as there just isn't room for more extensive logic problems without spanning more than one page.

In addition to traditional logic problems, this magazine includes a selection of sudoku. They use smallish grid squares with a fat, difficult to read the font used for the presupplied numbers. The puzzles are very easy at the beginning of an issue then very difficult towards the end with nothing in between. There are also two jigsaw sudoku and two sumoku puzzles at the end of each issue. Sumoku are a variant of sumdoku puzzles that don't include the 3x3 boxes constraint that's standard in nearly every variety of sudoku. The jigsaw sudoku are extremely easy for jigsaw sudoku and not likely to satisfy folks who actively seek out that sudoku variant. The sumoku are also fairly easy but I find it extremely difficult to allow myself to permit duplicates within the standard 3x3 grid spaces even though they're both legal and necessary for valid solutions of these puzzles.

Official's Variety Puzzles also includes four cross sums in each issue. Cross sums are my very favorite puzzles and it's nice to see them included here. I'm also happy that the puzzles selected for this title tend to be quite difficult, something that's rare in titles that include only a handful of such puzzles per issue.

The puzzles are well mixed together and nicely scattered throughout each issue. The exceptions are code crosswords and anacrostics which appear as two grouped sections with no breaks for other puzzles between them. I'm not sure why these puzzles are given special treatment; I'd greatly prefer to see them spread out more evenly throughout the magazine as a whole.

The solutions in this magazine tend to be fairly well presented. While they don't waste space, they also don't eliminate important information just to shorten the solutions section. If a puzzle has two parts, the solution to both are provided which I think is important but isn't always standard in other magazines. Because there are so many word puzzles in this magazine, there are a higher than usual percentage of multi-part puzzles such as those where you fill in a set of words which are used in some way to create a phrase (anagrams are one example of this) and it's nice to have the option to look up the one word you can't quite get rather than just having the final phrase available.

My one major complaint about Official's Variety Puzzles is that some of the pages are a bit faded, infrequently even to the point where some puzzles are difficult to read. There's no excuse for this; even a very basic quality control process after the physical printing of the magazine should catch a problem of this sort. Either Kappa isn't checking its finished product or doesn't care enough to fix it.

Official's Variety Puzzles is a bimonthly magazine with a $3.99 cover price. Annual subscriptions run $19.40 so unless you intend to buy every issue in a given year, you're better off just buying those issues you want on the news stand rather than subscribing. Either way, I would definitely buy this magazine if you like variety puzzles and especially if you like different sorts of word puzzles. It has a ton of word puzzles and many puzzles you can't find anywhere else. It's also the only variety puzzle title I've seen in the standard small puzzle magazine format. Official's Variety Puzzles is not a carbon copy of every other variety title out there which is very nice. Give it a try and see for yourself.