Look! Up in the Sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a tangram!
The Tangram Fury Comic Con Book has a series of original puzzles representing fun images of famous characters one might meet at a Comic Con, all done up as tangram puzzles. These include several from the Lord of the Rings books and films, Spiderman, a TMNT, the Karate Kid, Katniss, Harry on a broom, the Hulk, Thor's hammer, Napoleon, and several others. The author has met many of the actors that these tangrams pay tribute to, and given them copies of their personalized puzzles.
New Edition: The contents of this book have been updated to include a grid for solving the puzzles inside the book. The puzzles range in difficulty throughout the book. Some are more challenging than others. All puzzles have solutions using the same 7 tans (shapes). The puzzles can be solved by drawing on the grid, or by using the tangram template provided in the book to make physical tangram pieces (tans).
Note that the printed version of the book has the solutions in grayscale (black and white). Only the electronic version of the book has the solutions in color.
Tangrams are ancient Chinese, ingenious puzzles. They are deceptively simple in design, yet can stump even the most seasoned of puzzlers. Then, the light clicks on and the answer suddenly seems so obvious. It's amazing that so many puzzles can be solved with the exact same 7 shapes.
Following a brief introduction to tangrams, the main portion of the book provides challenging or whimsical Christmas-theme puzzles to solve, and their solutions, and the activities. This is followed by tidbits and trivia about tangrams and some famous people who have tinkered with tangrams over the years. (Can you solve the unsolvable "Mad Hatter" tangram created by Lewis Carroll?) It also provides some tips and suggestions for those with a competitive streak. The text sections of the books are largely the same in all books in the series, but the heart of the book - the part that includes the tangram puzzles - remains unique.
This book series was featured on the NewsWatch TV program on Discovery Channel: http: //newswatchtv.com/2015/12/18/tangram-fury/
Bringing tangrams into the 21st Century
Doug Nufer came across tangrams by accident. He was looking up a word in the dictionary and happened upon a diagram of the puzzle. Curious to know what puzzle was so famous that it was in the dictionary, he started to read up on them. Learning that tangrams can form animals, people, buildings, and dozens of other topics, the idea of creating a competitive tangram game hit him. This resulted in the game Tangram Fury. By then, the puzzle bug had fully hit him. He spent his spare time creating new tangram puzzles covering many themes. To date, he has created 1000+ tangram puzzles, a dozen themed tangram packs, and even more tangram books. He created most of the tangrams he uses in his books.
