Great distraction for during a roadtrip, my kids aged 7 and 11 enjoyed working together through the book. I would recommend it.

Very disappointed by this. It is just a book of empty templates and some games that all children probably already know.

With school summer holidays coming up, this book is a valuable resource I shall make full use of!

It features some games I had forgotten about from my own childhood, and others I am not familiar with.

Games are divided into sections based on whether you can play them together or separately. Word games and number games both feature - there really is something for everyone. While it looks to be targeted towards children, I can see plenty that will appeal to adults!

My thanks to NetGalley, author and publisher for the opportunity to review this book in exchange for an advance copy.

es, we live in a world of computers and i pads but sometimes it can be nice to see a kid engage with a pencil and paper game book. Here is a good one that is part of a series. It is well organized with the first part of the book including two player activities such as dancing man (awfully called hangman in the past) or dots, for example, and the second half of the book including one player puzzles such as sudoku and word searches. This would make a great item to pack before taking your child on a trip.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Collins Reference for this title. All opinions are my own.

Three books for allegedly "Big Thinkers" have come my way (out of a set of seven or more), and all work as very good mental workouts for the younger puzzler. "Logic Games for Big Thinkers" is fairly self-explanatory, with a very impressive spread of puzzles parents will find in their newspapers, but in junior forms. So sudokus are only 4x4 grids to start with, and what is basically something that will grow into a suguru uses more or less the same 'ripple effect' technique to spread stars around the grid of odd-shaped boxes, as opposed to every allowed numeral. 'No Four in a Row' is a twist on a kurosu, where rules dictate how we fill in a grid with Xs and Os. What is here called 'King's Journey' is a hidato according to a paper I get to see, but under any name is yet another of those damnably likeable Japanese efforts that have a global reach and no small satisfaction at getting done without problems. Number squares, code cracking tests, and the traditional logic problem with all the tick and cross boxes pepper these pages too – but I liked it when we did get a sustained run at one kind of puzzle with increasing difficulty, such as the suguru, the crosswords presented as jigsaw puzzles waiting to be completed once more, and the empty grid whose patches of loop (or dot-to-dot fence) we must extend to all corners. What we lose in variety we gain in pressure to become young experts at these kinds of things.

"Travel Games for Big Thinkers" is in two chunks, the first half being for two players, and giving us full instruction plus pages for us to complete the pastime perhaps a half a dozen times (or just five, if we like it enough to want photocopies made for subsequent sessions). We start with all we need for Hangman, including the ghost of the man due to be completed at his peril, and prompts for topics our chosen word can come from. Next it's combative dot-joining, with either player claiming the box between the dots when it's completed. 'Word Guess' is basically one player being a Wordle solver, with the other as setter. 'Vortex' is a simple numerical game to take part in, but one whose best tactics may well elude players for the entire holiday. Being given the grids for Noughts and Crosses seems cheap, seeing as how easily they can be made for ourselves, but there is certainly more stuff here for us to discover and have fun with.

At the midpoint it becomes a solitary hobby, and we get a right spread, from multiple choice quizzes, spot the differences, Kriss Krosses and suchlike, that tend to have a themed travel and transport and places topic, to the regular sudoku, mazes and so on. I did find an incorrect letter added to a part-filled arrow word, but little else to make me doubt any of these volumes' competency.

Finally for now, "Times Table Games for Big Thinkers" is obviously concentrating on maths, and is the one of these the more traditionally minded teacher will welcome the most. There are mazes still, but peppered by numbers, and we have restrictions based on whichever times table we're currently using as regards whether we can go past the numbers or not. We have to do simple mental multiplication in numerous ways, from solving the simplest of sums to fulfilling the pattern in the results of a rote times table. I would have thought things could be just called "even" as opposed to "answers in the two times table", but there you go. At least the book does what the others have, which is increase the difficulty very well – it sneaks in division here and there too, without us really noticing, and in the most taxing and logical puzzle demands we find common denominators of set numbers.

All three I saw looked very welcoming with their bright, colourful design, well written instructions, and at £4.99 seemed very good value for money. Yes, you could see the two-handed half of the travel book a little light on great content, but even when the maths became closest to resembling an old-fashioned exercise book it was cramming learning in through achievable and enjoyable tasks. That and the logic/brain training one get four and a half stars, and even the holiday special gets four.

I was actually quite disappointed with this to begin with, the first half is full of two-player games such as noughts and crosses, a Wordle type game, connect four and hangman (dancing man in this book) and none of those games need a printed book to play. I played those games countless times while travelling using just a notebook. I suppose for younger kids it would be easier as they don't have to draw out the templates, but I wouldn't buy a book solely for them.

The one-player section is better. There's a varied selection of travel related crosswords, wordsearches, spot the difference, those kind of puzzles. The difficulty goes up as you go through them but none of them are too hard I don't think. If the entire book was these I'd be more inclined to recommend it.

Just to note, I did notice a mistake on page 102, Aweet instead of Sweet. I can't promise there aren't more but I didn't notice while completing any of the rest of the puzzles.

ARC courtesy of NetGalley.