Extreme Dot-to-Dot (Timberdoodle Review)

The first time I ever saw Extreme Dot-to-Dot, I thought it looked like something a couple of my middle boys would enjoy, so I ordered a book to include in each of those sons’ Christmas stockings that year.

Sure enough, when Christmas morning arrived, both recipients were thrilled. It wasn’t long, though, before I realized the books had a much broader appeal than I’d anticipated. By day’s end, our older kids (girls and boys alike) were watching the dot-to-dotters work and offering to trade candy, trinkets, or even money for the privilege of completing “just one page” out of their brothers’ books.

Needless to say, we ended up buying every Extreme Dot-to-Dot title available at the time. So when Timberdoodle recently added Extreme Dot-to-Dot: Spectacular Places to their catalog and offered to send me a free copy to review, I jumped at the opportunity. (Update: Although Timberdoodle no longer carries Extreme Dot-to-Dot: Spectacular Places, they do offer lots of other volumes, many of which we’ve tried and like just as well.

Extreme Dot-to-Dot: Spectacular Places was put out by a different publisher than our other volumes. The pages are a little bigger, but the format is the same.

The book contains 42 intricate designs comprised of more than 50,000 dots in all. Not an exercise for the faint-hearted!

These challenging puzzles sharpen mental acuity and concentration skills. After all these years, our kids still love them.

Each design is accompanied by clues on the facing page. It’s fun to see if you can guess what the picture will be before you finish connecting the dots.

Since our family loves to travel, it’s especially fun to complete the puzzles in Extreme Dot-to-Dot: Spectacular Places, because so many of them are places we’ve visited before!