Book excerpt: Are you ready for Sudoku without numbers? This book delivers with bodacious collection of 500 "Word Sudoku" puzzles. It's easy enough to "translate" any conventional Sudoku puzzle (which uses the digits 1 through 9) into a puzzle with any 9 unique objects; for example, colored dots, emoji, or even hieroglyphics... whatever. However, if the puzzle creator substitutes letters of the alphabet for the numbers, this presents an interesting possibility. If the letters are carefully chosen and arranged properly, then a particular row or column can spell out a familiar English word. The puzzle solver can use this to their advantage! If the word is identified and placed properly in the puzzle, then the solver gains a distinct advantage and the puzzle can become much easier to solve. Word Sudoku: 500 Word Sudoku Puzzles presents 400 of these puzzles that can be solved with or without figuring out the embedded word. To make things even more interesting, the last 100 puzzles present an additional challenge: If you try to solve these puzzles "the old-fashioned way" (using conventional Sudoku puzzle solving strategies), you may get stuck (i.e., these may not be true Sudoku puzzles with a unique solution). However, if you identify the word and place it in the puzzle, the resulting puzzle will now have a unique solution and you should be able to finish solving the puzzle successfully. The puzzles are rated from 1-Star (relatively easy) to 6-Star (relatively difficult). For the 1-Star and 2-Star puzzles, a convenient hint is provided: The row or column where the word is located is shaded for you. If you find these puzzles too easy, skip ahead to the more difficult puzzles! As an added bonus, Word Sudoku: 500 Word Sudoku Puzzles includes a chapter on the strategies you may need to use to solve conventional numeric Sudoku puzzles as well as the Word Sudoku puzzles appearing in this book. If you're a seasoned Sudoku puzzle solver, you are probably already familiar with many of these strategies. If you are a beginner or if you find yourself getting stuck from time-to-time, check out these strategies and add them to your Sudoku-solving tool kit! All puzzles appearing in this book were created by the author, are brand new, and are appearing here for the first time.