FORMAT: HARDCOVER | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
Puzzle books come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. The Nerd Search range is a collection of rather thin books filled with colour illustrations. The idea is the various pictures refer to facts and trivia relating to a particularly ‘nerdy’ topic. In the case of Nerd Search Star Trek – Quibbles With Tribbles, it’s Star Trek.
They are a total of eight puzzles, each one a two-page spread. The illustrations are inspired by classic episodes of Star Trek The Original Series. Classics such as Amok Time, A Piece of The Action and Devil in The Dark get the NerdSearch treatment and it is rather fun to carefully pick through the illustrations and trying to figure out what’s wrong with it.
Answers tend to be things like ‘character in illustration was not in that episode’ or ‘The Enterprise can’t do that’ and so on. You do actually need to know the show to get any fun out of this. Which brings us to the main problem; it’s not clear who this book is for. The drawings and premise are rather child-like, but it’s unlikely that young minds would care.
Instead, this is a spot-the-difference book for grown-ups and feels like an attempt to do a ‘adult colouring-in book’, but with picture searches instead. The result is fun, but sometimes not quite as satisfying as it could be. It walks the line between being fun and being tough, and sometimes the puzzle just needs to more difficult in order to be fun.
The same range includes a book called Ghostbusters – Eerie Errors and Suspect Ghosts which does the same thing, but with the movie Ghostbusters. Comparing the two you can really see how the Star Trek one shines; Star Trek has a dense canon but some eye-popping moments, whereas the Ghostbusters one is much more specialized, making more of a source of trivia than a puzzle book.
Nerd Search Star Trek – Quibbles With Tribbles isn’t a terribly challenging puzzle book if you’re a huge Trek fan and practically impossible if your aren’t. It’s a great stocking-filler for a Trekkie and an amusing curiousity for the rest of us.
