WE Games Deluxe Wooden Sudoku Puzzle with Wooden Number and Thinking Tiles

When it arrived I launched a game straightaway with a very seasoned Sudoku player, an elderly member of the family. She doesn’t play board games usually but will enjoy sudoku. No instructions were read!Everything was obvious to the sudoku player, including how to use the mini thinking tiles and the dual sided larger thinking tiles. We used a very difficult puzzle from a sudoku book by Nikoli.Did not face a shortage of mini thinking tiles. Maybe it’s just our way of play - to not clutter every square with all the possibilities. Just used what was provided.The box came in a sophisticated black and red theme. Great as a gift for adults, teenagers or older children. Compact not bulky. So pleased that they did not design the box to be positioned solely as a small child’s game. Nice!The board surface is mostly plywood and smooth veneer. Not bulky or heavy. Definitely not carved out of solid precious woods either. The product shots are fairly accurate.The key difference between this WE Games edition of a wooden Sudoku board in comparison with the numerous generic no name wooden Sudoku boards currently out there is the use of a slightly larger 1.8cm tile size instead of a smaller 1.5cm; and the inclusion of mini thinking tiles which you can order more of if needed. Mini thinking tiles are frequently omitted on generic models but is good to have for medium to difficult puzzles if buying for an experienced Sudoku player.A segmented drawer for different tiles would have been nice but is not a deal breaker. A removable grid may also be nice to some. A stained wood color for the board would be nice but is still not a deal breaker. The clean light wood color will age with time and have it’s own charm.Note: Our boxed set oddly had no ‘6’ mini thinking tiles so we reversed the 9s. Large tiles were thankfully complete. I did order additional mini thinking tiles but I did not use them.The manual is clearly written in English by someone who cares about the game. Thank you!Nothing fell out of the drawers yet. It does get stored in the box always. Just handle, store and transport with care. It’s not a toy to be given to infants or very young children.Mini tiles are similar in quality as seen in the Amazon supplier product shots. Nothing like the ones seen by some negative Amazon reviews which had terribly deformed tiles. It is adequate and usable.

I love this game! Bought a second game for a family member. FYI game # 9 has a mistake in the set up in the instruction booklet. 2nd row, 2nd coloumn has two 5s.

This is a great board! We love having the numbers in two different colors and we love having the thinking tiles. The board is well made and being able to put the tiles away in drawers is great. It's nice enough to leave sitting out, but also comes in a sturdy box if you'd like to put it away. The grid on top is also nice so the tiles don't slide around. A few of the numbers are printed a little off center, but that doesn't bother me. I really have no complaints. We love this board and so do others when we've given it as a gift. I like that I am no longer searching for good sudoku books or printable puzzles online.My only issue right now is I'm trying to order another one for a gift and it hasn't been available for the past few weeks until now, when Dorm Room Games began offering it at over twice the price. I bought my other boards just two months ago for $30, free shipping, and they are asking $50 plus $15 shipping, which is ridiculous. I'm hoping it is offered again soon at a reasonable price.

Love this!!! Well designed! It even came with an extra tile for each number!

The best feature of this product is the inclusion of "thinking tiles" by which you can indicate possible numbers in a square. Most competing products do not have "thinking tiles", which is a serious omission for a player who likes 4- and 5-star puzzles. Each "thinking tile" is one-fourth the size of the large "number tiles" (which fit very nicely into the 9 x 9 grid), so four of them fit into each of the 81 empty squares. Each "number tile" is clearly printed with black and red numbers on opposite sides.The finish of the product, both the board itself and the tiles, is excellent -- with one exception. There is a black divider which defines the overall 3 x 3 grid of the board -- I found it to be off-center to a sufficient degree to be distracting. But there is a simple fix -- black magic marker, carefully applied.I gave an identical product to my elderly uncle -- it comes in a nice shrink-wrapped container and makes for a nice presentation. It came two days earlier than promised.My last comment is that the product is made in China for a California company. If I had known that, I might not have bought the product. I would encourage the manufacturer to outsource production to another country which doesn't use slave labor or abuse the human rights of its population.