Code Words: 100 of the best Code Words Puzzles: Volume 1

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Codebreakers are fiendishly addictive puzzles in which every letter in a typical crossword grid has been replaced by a number between 1 and 26. How well any of these techniques work for you will depend on how good your vocabulary is and how good your brain is at answering questions like "are there any words matching these letters? There aren't a lot of posibilities for this; I see DAZED, FAZED, LAZED, RAZED; maybe FUZED in American English (but this is a UK newspaper so probably not). Welcome to Books Kingdom, the independent publishing brand that is dedicated to helping you boost your IQ with fun and challenging brain games!

At this point, the thing to do is to look at the grid and see whether there are words that become either easy or impossible if these guesses are right. The latter is interesting because we already have half the letters, and because when we have a vowel and a consonant with only one letter between them it's often quite restrictive. It's not perfect - but it is easy to learn its little idiosyncrasies and see how swiftly each grid can be completed. All alphabetical letters make one or more appearance in the grid and are represented by the exact same number wherever they appear throughout the grid.

Technique: when making a guess, look to see whether it interacts usefully with other words you've already got. From there, your first priority is to get the common letters out of the way, in particular, the vowels. I've done scores, possibly hundreds of codewords, and using the above tricks only had to look up the answer (where supplied) on a single occasion. We’ve got you going with a couple of combinations, so all you need to do is start linking the other letters and corresponding numbers and your words will start flowing. Since three consonants in a row is unlikely in such a short word, we expect the u to be present, which almost instantaneously reveals two common options: aunt and abut.

The majority of pages are undamaged with some creasing or tearing, and pencil underlining of text, but this is minimal.Codeword continues the tradition by offering enjoyable puzzles that challenge the player without adding to their stress levels.