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#1: Rich Garrard (KCRich) on Aug 18, 2010

I remember those days of first seeing the puzzles about 17 years ago in Games. (either 1993 or 94). I bought that first Paint by Numbers book with the orange border and dinosaur on the cover and worked that during one summer school session in college. A friend of mine has now gotten hooked on them after having been to Japan a couple of years ago and bringing back several dedicated magazines of them when he came home. Some of the Japanese mags have big fold out puzzles that make the 99x99 puzzles seems small. I would hate to put one square in the wrong place in those. :)

I did the dinosaur book twice because, for years, it was the ONLY book.

Where can I find other books besides the dinosaur one?

samo #2

Ron,
I found "The Official Book Of Hanjie" by Timothy Parker published in 2006 by Plume (a division of Penguin).
There is also a series where PBN is called O'Eaki available from:
vertical-inc.com
These are created by Tetsuya Nishio, who claims to have invented the form.

Tom - What is "samo?" A Basquiat reference?

Robert... i did the dinosaur book twice or maybe 3 x

There's a tab on the left called "BOOKS".

The World of Puzzles magazine always has a decent section of PBN, too.

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I also did the dinosaur book - still have it! I loved theses puzzles in Games Magazine - they were always my favorite ones to solve. That's why this website is like heaven to me - a never-ending source!

Have Games Magazine and Games World of Puzzles ceased publishing? I look for them every now and then on magazine racks, but can't find them. My favorite puzzles are Paint By Number, Cross Sums and Number Place (the original name for Sudoku) though Number Place was found in Dell puzzle magazines.

I think I first learned of them from seeing the title of a game guide on GameFAQs for Oekaki logic. The submitter who sent it in was 13 or 14 or so and--well, it showed sometimes when he posted on a message board.

So I wondered what a 14 year old who was a bit awkward on the message boards was doing with some fancy logic game name. In Japanese no less! I learned that PBN cut across language barriers in the process.

I think there was also Picross and I wondered how people could crank out guides so quickly. (The guides were pretty much just text X's and .'s.) Some people who wanted to move their way up the contributor volume ranking talked about how Picross etc was really fun and really good for that.

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