The Dragon Isles

The only chart of the Dragon Isles was eaten — by weather, or by something worse. Queen Ysolde the Old has sent her new Royal Cartographer south across the Sundered Sea to draw the next one, and the dragon Ashwyn, who has counted every island for longer than anyone can remember, will allow it on three terms: count the islands exactly as she remembers them, keep the water in one piece, and leave no still pool anywhere.

Those terms are the rules of the island puzzle, a classic pencil-and-paper logic puzzle: shade the sea, leave the islands white, make every numbered island exactly the size of its number, keep the sea connected, and never let it fill a 2 x 2 block. Every one of the 100 charts has exactly one solution, and every one can be reasoned out without guessing.

Inside

• 100 island-and-sea puzzles in ten archipelagos, from 6 x 6 to 12 x 12
• Four difficulty levels, Shoal to Wyrm, rising through the book
• Clear rules with diagrams, a worked example and a page of techniques
• A cartographer’s journal across the Dragon Isles, with a twist after the solutions
• Full solutions, a map of the Sundered Sea, a bestiary and rich ink illustrations
• Quill the owl hiding in seven pictures

For adults who love logic puzzles and fantasy in equal measure. Island puzzles are as satisfying as sudoku but stranger and more spatial, and this book teaches them from the very first chart. Large 8.5 x 11 inch pages, the big charts one to a page, black-and-white interior. Book three of the Owlbrook Legends, each a standalone survey of the realm of Aldermere with its own kind of puzzle and its own story.