Is It Bad To Get Help?

Orbit from Dee Dixon

Way back in June I ordered and received this gorgeous little (gulp!) box from the amazing Dee Dixon. The goal of this puzzle is to remove the center piece so I guess I cannot classify it as anything other than a box but I won't let that discourage me from denying that I collect boxes. It is vibrantly beautiful made from Canarywood and Purpleheart and measures 5 x 5 x 2". I set to playing with it as soon as it arrived only to rapidly get stumped. Dee had said:

"Orbit is a seemingly simple puzzle that will have you going in circles trying to decipher the mechanism that keeps it firmly locked in position."

And he wasn't kidding. I wondered whether the odd shape on the lid had any significance but couldn't seem to find one. Maybe that shape was just there to act as a handle? The lid spun around freely most of the time until at odd intervals, it went click and wouldn't spin any more - I had absolutely no idea why! Sometimes I found that things inside had shifted and I could tilt the lid and when tilting it there was an alarming sound of what I thought might be ball bearings inside. Every now and then, if you peek around the edge of the disk with a bright light then you catch a fleeting glimpse of something shiny - was this confirmation of my ball bearing thought?

I went round and round in circles, spinning and not spinning, tilting and pulling and generally getting nowhere. This went on for months! I moved it from my tray of allowed puzzles in the kitchen (thank you dear) to my other tray of allowed puzzles in the living room where I played whilst watching TV. All the while I kept doing the same sort of thing over and over and over again! No matter how many times I did the same thing, I never seemed to be able to make any headway. The odd thing was sometimes things moved and sometimes they didn't. This was despite doing the same moves repeatedly! Maybe Einstein was wrong and sometimes different things happen? After about 3 months I had to stop for a while and just went back to it every now and then. Until the recent MPP!

Someone had also brought in their copy of Orbit (I think it might have been Allard but in my confusion of solving and playing with so many puzzles in one day, I couldn't be sure). Another admission that this copy had never been solved made me feel a lot better and it was handed to another puzzler who claimed to know how it worked. My jaw literally hit the floor when he opened that copy of the puzzle in about 60 seconds - that was absolutely bloody bonkers! I briefly looked inside and saw things that were surprisingly not ball bearings. Hmmm! I did see what looked like a locking mechanism but tried not to look too closely.

When I came home I quickly got working on it and used my phone as a torch. At this point, the Aha! moment almost knocked me on my back. It is so simple...why could I not work it out?

No clues here.

Some of the rattling was coming from the little flame that was inside and maybe that had confused me. I can now categorically state that the shape on top is useful for more than being a handle and I can also conclude that I am not terribly bright!

Having finally understood the mechanism, I can now understand all the funny things that seemed to be going on inside like the tilting, the spinning which sometimes wouldn't happen and the clicking noises inside. I have now opened it from fully locked inside of 60 seconds and feel very smug about it! It is genuinely quite simple in design but, for me at least, seems impossible to work out without some sort of clue. Sigh!

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2 sets of salt and pepper shakers!
Something is wrong with the lettering though!

I saw that Jon Keegan and Tartarus puzzles were offering the Sandfield salt and pepper shakers in their beautiful metal version. Even though I have the original proudly displayed on the shelf directly in front of me, I could not receive something similar of Jon's quality.

They have truly managed a beautiful recreation of the original puzzles with only the odd lettering and a slight tiny change in the detail of the solution. It took me about 15 minutes to recall the process and redo it until I had a bunch of pieces and my seasoning:

Salt and pepper released from the cruet set

Even Mrs S agreed that they look gorgeous on display. If you get a chance to own it or at least play with them then jump at the chance!

Positively Pristine Plastic Puzzles Prove....

That Practice Makes Perfect

Adin's 3-piece Board Burr
Adin has let me know that he got this from PWBP
It is Evgenia's Knot by Aleksandr Leontev (a brilliant designer)

This will be a quickie. I am not up to much puzzling or writing having had my last remaining pussycat get very ill and had to be put down a few days ago. All I can bring myself to do is write about a few quick puzzles I have played with to take my mind off things.

My friend Adin has bought himself a 3D printer and has been designing and making new toys at an incredible rate. I am amazed at the ease with which he has taken to it and made some wonderful challenges. He was kind enough to give a few away at the MPP and I couldn't resist despite knowing the effect a proliferation of plastic would have on Mrs S. With the cat getting ill, I needed something to take my mind of it and also something not hugely challenging. A 3-piece board burr should be just the ticket.  I don't think Adin has named it. It's not a hugely tough disassembly puzzle but there is an interesting sequence to it. I decided to take it apart and scramble the pieces to see whether the 3 pieces would defeat me as an assembly challenge.

Doesn't look too hard

The fun thing for me is that the position of the individual pieces is pretty easy to work out. I was able to assemble any 2 pieces into the correct position in each case quite easily. This meant that it should be a relatively simple process to assemble 3. It may be simple for Adin and Rich (and maybe all of the rest of you) but I am truly awful at assembly. It was possible for me but took me an embarrassing 30 minutes! After practicing a few times, I thought I had the system for it and decided to attempt a pure assembly puzzle with no muscle memory of a disassembly first.

Random un-named 3-piece board burr

Allard has also been printing puzzles with abandon and had left a few to be picked up at the MPP. I couldn't resist this one which was in a little bag of pieces. Having had some modicum of success with Adin's puzzle, I finally got the courage to try this one. Again, I was able to assemble any 2 pieces into position as there were no other options possible. But when it came to the 3 pieces together, I found that there was very little possible movement of any pair to make space for the third one to be placed. I tried every possible combination as my starting two but it seemed impossible to place the third one. There was just no space to get them to intertwine. Time for a little think© which I am sure was what Allard had intended. Luckily, my time with the other one had strengthened my bwain for a short amount of time and I was able to find a rather nicely hidden path to get my assembly.

I'm a genius? Almost certainly not!

Now I was full of confidence, it was time to attempt a new concept - Adin's changing piece burr:

Adin's changing piece burr

Yes, it's "just" a six piece burr! But no, it's not! Straight away in the picture above, you should see a joint in the pieces that should not be there in a standard 6 piece burr. I noticed it straight away and realised that this might be a bit of a challenge. After all these years of playing with burrs, I am actually quite good at disassembly (as long as the level is not astronomically high). The burr came apart in one of the standard methods (splitting into 2 halves before dismantling each pair of three:

2 oddities are visible

As soon as you see the interior of the pieces then you can see something odd. One of the pieces has an odd shaped segment and another is not based on the standard 2x2x6 grid. The whole point of this is that one piece comes apart and the parts assembled with another into a different set:

Pull one part off and plug it into another

A new 6 piece burr

Full of self confidence, I attempted the assembly and very quickly hit a brick wall! Maybe my limit for assembly is 3 pieces? I initially struggled to find even any assemblies, let alone any solutions. I had hoped that with the very odd grid sizes of two of the pieces, it might be quite simple to find the piece positions. It took me a half day to find even one! In retrospect, Burrtools tells me that there are 5 assemblies but only one solution with 5 moves to split it in two and 8 for the first piece removal. That half day was not misspent - the assembly that I had found was by luck the correct one and after another hour of fiddling I managed to put it together. Adin is a genius (joining Derek and Shane in that hall of fame). 

It would appear that practice makes perfect! Now if only I could stick to just one type of puzzle and keep going with that until I got really good at it. But you all know that I am easily distracted by squirrels and other puzzles!

This One Needs To Be Locked Up

Chained Lock by Luke from Waier creations

Back view

I was rather late to the party with this one. In fact, I am late with quite a lot of new toys! I really don't have much time for the Mechanical Puzzle Discord where many of the latest and greatest creations get announced as well as bought and sold. I wish I did have time but I seem to find myself working very long days and very long weeks (I seem to be half way through a month of 6-day weeks yet again. I am getting a bit too old to work that relentlessly).

The first thing I knew about this one was when Allard reviewed it on his site. As soon as I read the review I headed off to the website and managed to nab the last one there. The only one that was there at that time was the slightly more expensive all-metal version. It quickly winged it's way across the pond and arrived in PuzzleMad HQ - it arrived in October amidst a huge flurry of deliveries including a Pelikan arrival, a Tom Lensch arrival as well as an extravaganza from Tye's NothingYetDesigns. Needless to say, "she" was distinctly unimpressed as the arrivals tray in the kitchen was piled to overflowing. I promised to redistribute them elsewhere and immediately pocketed this one to play with straight away.

The aim here is to remove the key from the lock. This will require tools that are discovered along the way and quite a bit of thought© which might explain one of the reasons that I am only writing about it at the beginning of December. 

Of course, you have to do the obvious and see whether the key will turn and...of course it won't! It would appear that this puzzle is stuck with the lock in the unlocked position - with this sort of lock the key is only removable when the lock is locked. Time to look for tools. Allard had found himself stuck after a few steps and needed a little hint from Ali. I began my play and removed the keyring with tiny hex key from the main key and then played with the knurled thumbwheel on the front. I began to accumulate bits and pieces to use on it. This was fun. The cat got interested in the hex key and I had to stop for a while for fear of losing pieces. Within about 30 minutes I had 5 separate items and then I got stuck. I suspect it was at the same place that Allard did. 

I got stuck for a very long time. I created various tools using the items in my collection but none of them seemed to help. I had tried one particular move with a nice combination of pieces (something that I am sure I have used before on a different puzzle - hence the thought that I got stuck at the same move as Allard). I tried doing the crucial move but it never worked and I assumed that I had not found the correct tool. I was proper stuck and it went back into my tray to be picked up and fiddled with every few days. No progress between mid October and the middle of November.

At the last MPP, a couple of people had brought their copies along with them and a few other picked it up. I happened to be around when Shane was supervising a puzzler on it and I sidled over to "just watch that critical move" that I had been unable to perform for so long. I did say to Shane what I wanted to do and just as the other puzzler achieved it, he acknowledged that it could be done in one of two ways and my way should work. I quickly stopped looking so as not to spoil the remainder.

The day after that MPP, I had another go using both possible techniques and it was fused solid. There was no way that I was going to shift that piece. At least I knew what the correct next step was and had no qualms about using an external tool. Time for an Allen key! I tried my set and no go. My set that I had easy access to was Metric and of course being made in the US, everything is imperial measurements. It was time to go up to my second toolbox in the loft (Damn! it was freezing up there!) and retrieve my other set. A few seconds later, I found the correct size and had to use a considerable amount of force to undo the next piece of the puzzle. There was absolutely no way on earth I could have achieved that with the tools provided in the puzzle. That was a bit of a downer for me with this puzzle but I was determined to carry on and enjoy it. At this point there are even more pieces and they need to be combined to create yet another tool. This gets used to turn something and nothing happens. At least nothing happens until you realise how important gravity is - beyond keeping us on the planet and the planet in the solar system and the universe working correctly etc. 

After that discovery, there was yet another tool and I got stuck. Yes, again! I am really not terribly bright. Looking at what was left at this point, I didn't have much left on the puzzle to play with and a LOT of pieces on the desk. After a day, it was time to email Shane. This was a bit like old times, me getting stuck on something and asking Shane for help. He's another one of those bloody geniuses - he hides it behind a very big gob but there's not much that's mechanical that he can't work out. He nudged me to look in a certain direction after I described one of my discoveries. At that point there was a wonderful Aha! moment and I freed the key:

Key removed - tools all hidden from view

I now understand the huge enthusiasm that the puzzling community had for this puzzle. It is beautifully made with a whole bunch of tools and Aha! moments to be found. The mechanism is very ingenious. I think I will be taking this to work this week to torture poor Colin with on Wednesday. If you get a chance to buy a copy or at least play with a copy then jump at the chance - it's really really clever.

It no longer seems to be available for sale. Luke has moved onto his next creation which has also sold out in pre-order very very quickly (there will only be 100). I was working when the notification arrived and missed out, but hopefully I will get a chance to play with someone's copy at an MPP

It Ain't Wood, But Plastic is Still Fantastic!

These Brought Real Happiness

Great Haul from last week's MPP
Quite a few were from the IPP

After last week's MPP (great write up from Allard here), I came home with a bunch of new toys to play with much to the disgust of the first wife. There is a bit of pressure to tidy up in PuzzleMad HQ because the collection is out of control and I have been working so much that the new acquisitions have just been placed on my desk, next to my living room armchair, in the conservatory and (heaven help me!) in the dining room! "She" has told me in ever increasingly irritated terms that they had better be cleared up or extreme measures will be taken. I have not had the courage to ask what they were! I had one last day of annual leave last Tuesday and, having had some new fitted wardrobes installed in my, gulp, second puzzle room. I was provided with some storage containers (nice ones that her tidiness fetish had "forced" her to buy) and told that the dining room needs to be clear by the end of the day. 

Needless to say, with that look in her eyes, I quickly complied and after several hours of moving things around, finding 2 puzzles that I did not remember the names of (thank you Aaron for reminding me) and we had a nice tidy puzzle free (almost) dining room. The latest acquisitions were placed into a position to play with and I have used what little time I have had this week to attempt to solve some.

Jigs4w by Haym Hirsh (made by Tye Stahly)

Poor Colin!

I have had only a little success with the 5 piece Jig5aw from Haym, managing only to solve 1 of the 3 challenges and despite hours of attempts, not gotten anywhere close to success on the other 2. However, I had been full of confidence having solved the 10 piece jigsaw and had watched my poor assistant and trainee fail dismally at it. I received the Jigs4w as part of my IPP haul which Ali had carted back for me and immediately suffered the same problem as I had had with the 5 piece. Damn! That man is so devious!

No matter what you do with this one there always seems to be there always seems to be one of the tabs overlapping the edge of the frame. For heaven's sake! There are only 4 pieces! Why is it so difficult?

To my eternal shame, it took me 4 hours of trying the same thing over and over again until I finally got it! Why was I trying the same thing repeatedly? Because I couldn't remember previous combinations and orientations of pieces. Not only am I not a genius like Derek, I am actually not terribly bright. I think I have written that before on this website. 

I think this is called Second Stellation Interlocking puzzle

This shiny piece of jagged plastic was being given away free at the MPP (I think it was Allard that made it) and I was forced to take it home disassembled like this. When I unpacked it and stuffed it onto my pile to be payed with next to my chair, I got a beady eyed look and decided that I had better get on with it pretty quickly. It really does look cluttered when left as a pile o' pieces. I did express yet again the wish to buy a cheap 3D printer of my own but was very quickly disabused of the idea when I was told that the spiders in the garage might eat me alive whilst I slept...because that would be where I would be living!

I had seen this one come apart, so I was aware that it was yet another variation of the Diagonal star puzzle which I have written about many times. However, when trying to put this one together, there are various notches in the stem of the pieces (obviously they interlock) and an awful lot of sharp end pieces getting in the way of each other once more than 2 are assembled. Despite the pain of stabbing myself a couple of times, I happily played with these in various combinations and managed to create two 3-piece halves which would not assemble together due to being blocked. Time to think© and I had a proper look at the shapes and after a lovely little Aha! moment I had a more presentable shape to show Mrs S:

I think this might be the best diagonal star yet.
It would be amazing in wood

That is two puzzles solved in a week!

Happiness cube #001

Happiness cube #006

I have a history of misery with happiness cubes! I have a bunch of them in wood and the b£@$tards took them apart and mixed them all up......TWICE! Amongst the same pile of freebies was a few more happiness cubes and at the end of the day, there were a couple left over to be picked up my me. Yay!

Starting with this week, I will be working 6 day weeks for the next month which means I will need as much happiness as I could get. I was very impressed with Rich's collection of 3D printed hapinnes cubes and playing with them last week reminded me that I love finding disassemblies. After getting home from work yesterday, I felt the need to take something to bits and had a lovely time exploring the movements and disassembly sequence of these. I even managed to make enough muscle memory to be able to assemble them again after rearranging the pieces for the photo. I may need to prevail upon someone with a 3D printer to make me a bunch more of them!

Number 1 pieces

Number 6 pieces

They are now back together and ready for filing away with my other pieces of happiness!

Thank you Allard for a great MPP and also for the plastic fantastic fun.

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Also, thank you to my readers for helping me pass yet another milestone. I have now had over 4 million page views since I begun the term into lunacy in 2011. The views even continued after the death of my mother and have taken off over the last year. It may well be that my site is just being scraped by AI bots and if that is the case then we will be safe from the machine overlords for a while yet. My drivel won't teach them anything useful!

Main site

New stuff site

3,975,734 + 97,169 makes 4,072,903

Thank you so much, guys and bots, for putting up with my craziness!

Girish's Wooden Entanglement Puzzles

Twisted Rabbit by Girsh Sharma made by Brian Menold

Last week I reviewed a fabulous assembly puzzle designed by Girish Sharma (Shiba Inu) from Pelikan (2 still in stock) and marvelled at the amazing way he is able to create burrs as assembly puzzles that are accessible to the average puzzler (although still very difficult) and very interesting in their challenge and design. Shortly before the Pelikan puzzles arrived, I received a lovely little batch of beauties from Brian Menold's Wood Wonders store. When they were announced, I had to force myself to decide on just a few to add to the collection because I can no longer see even a hint of my desk and the piles of puzzles to be solved are starting to get embarrassingly large in several other rooms of the house much to the disgust and anger of "someone else" who lives here. She has just said that I remind her of those hoarders that we see on TV occasionally living in filth. I did have to protest that they are all very clean which earned me a stare and an implied threat.

Not only does Girish design burrs but he also designs Turning Interlocking Cubes (TICs) which have gotten more and more complex over the last few years. Some of them are quite fearsome in their complexity. There were 3 in Brian's recent release and I got them all.

First up was Snake Eyes - I had thought that having only 2 pieces, it might be a nice starter, slightly easier puzzle to begin with having not done any TICs for a while. The copy I received was made from Cerejeira and Movingui which made a beautiful contrast. The international postal service had broken a joint on mine and I was delayed in my play by having to glue it back together again. Interestingly, there is only one way the 2 pieces can be interlocked into each other which is always helpful at first and then I  realised that there were lots of possible rotations that can be done. I started moving them about and getting increasingly worried that I will never get them apart again when I found that I had gone in a full circle and they fell apart on me. That was unexpected! Try again and yet again they rotated around each other in a full circle before finding myself at the beginning. I was obviously missing a move (or 2 or 3 or ...). In fact, this reminded me very much of quite a few of the wire disentanglement puzzles I have played with over the years. Lots of moves that I struggle to remember before ending up at the start. Frustrating but fun. Having done Einstein proud by repeating the same thing over and over again, I finally had enough memory of my moves to be able to recognise my path and also explore ways to get off that path. Several of them ended up nowhere but finally after about 2 days of fiddling, I got my Aha! moment. It is lovely - just 2 pieces and yet so very clever:

Two Twisted rabbits intertwined...at last

Next up was the 3 piece TIC released at the same time (also by Girish) - Snake Eyes

Snake Eyes by Girish and Brian

This version is made using Cerejeira, Wenge and Sipo. I expected this to be a significant step up in challenge and was not disappointed. Brian wrote this:

"Lots of moves and rotations. I think I lost track of the rotations at 9 and the moves at 30! A really fun challenge always has lots of rotations. This puzzle holds up its end in that regard."

3 pieces means that you need to make a choice where to start and I chose wrongly at first because I'm an eejit. I should have picked the 2 pieces that had a restricted way of being introduced. Luckily I realised my error quickly. The two critical pieces can be entangled in 2 ways but just thinking about the end position (of which there are 2 possibilities) narrows it down. Yes, I used thought© not random trial and error to choose my starting positions and then started rotating. Oh boy! There are a LOT of rotations! I lost count well before the 9 that Brian did. Thinking that I might have gone too far, I backtracked to the beginning a few times until, at one point, I found that I couldn't get back to the start. I was fully committed to this puzzle now. It needed another 2 days to find my way through - and that was just those two starting pieces! Yet again, Girish has designed a wooden entanglement puzzle here with more constraints than a wire one has. It is marvellous! Once I had the first two pieces correctly placed, it was obvious where the final one went and only a bit of work to back track to make space and then sequentially lock them all together:

3 pieces make my cube - the Snake eyes are visible

I have some serious concerns about being able to take it apart again. I have absolutely no idea how I did it! Yay! Brilliant fun - always looking for more from this great pairing of craftsman and designer.

Yesterday was the last MPP of the year and for once I wasn't working. I headed down to Birmingham and joined the boys for a day of fun, puzzling and a kebab. I am sure that Allard will be writing a story about it soon. Mrs S immediately commented on my arrival home that I had left with 1 box of puzzles and arrived home with 2! Whack! Ouch!

Here is what I got:

Not a bad puzzle haul - it includes what Ali brought back from IPP for me
The cardboard box is a new one from Kyle Chester Marsden with a Xmas theme (I'm saving it for then)

When I took the photo, I actually missed the extra gift from Stefan - he has perfected Micro 3D printing and made a Soma cube with box that are so small that you need tweezers. The one I got was the big one because age made me fearful of not being able to focus on the even smaller one!

Each Voxel is 1mm!

Seven Puzzles From Pelikan Not To Miss In November

Pelikan release for end of 2024

Today I am reviewing the upcoming release of gorgeous delights from Jakub, Jaroslav and the Pelikan team. You may have seen the video already by Ivan - he also does all the photography for the Pelikan site and he is brilliant at it.

Twister Box

Twister Box - a new Pelikan design

This beautiful little creation is a Pelikan design and it is really REALLY clever with a wonderful laugh out loud moment when the secret is discovered. The team has made it using Mahogany, Walnut and magnets…LOTS of magnets and really REALLY strong ones too. Don’t put this near your pacemaker! They have made some lovely slipfeathers and an engraved spiral on top to make it even more pretty. The aim, obviously, is to open the box. Bear in mind that I am really bad at boxes (I have several sequential discovery boxes sitting in my kitchen annoying Mrs S because I have failed to find any moves at all). Reading this paragraph there are a whole lot of "really's" in it but this puzzle needs all of them! 

I discovered the first step of this puzzle quite quickly which is how I knew there were magnets. Once this discovery is past you then it’s time to play with what you have found. You do this by feel and intuition and have to try and understand why things inside seem to be flipping over and back at times. The odd thing is it just all feels rather random. You need to keep at it for a while and all of a sudden there is a change and you’ve opened it. I would guess that most people will open it mostly by chance and then laugh and then play with the open box mechanism for a while to understand what you did and work out a cleaner quicker way to do it. I can now open and re-lock it in a matter of a minute now that I understand the clever mechanism. I must say that I have never seen anything like it before.

It took me a whole week to open it and I’ve been playing with it for a few hours now and it still makes me smile when I look at the mechanism. This is stunning.

Little Tetra Flop

Little Tetra Flop by Dr Volker Latussek

This fabulous new challenge from Dr Volker Latussek continues the wonderful Flop series but showing that he can now see the benefits of the side holes over the loss of purity from an incomplete box.

Pelikan has created this beauty out of Wenge and American Cherry, keeping the 4x1 piece outside of the box (which is 4x3x2 voxels with a 1½ voxel deep entry postbox on top).

The first challenge is to work out how to remove the pieces from the box. As we all know Volker designs both the puzzle and the delivery conformation to be a challenge and this one really takes it to the max - it took me a good 30 minutes to get all the pieces free. I love this aspect of these puzzles. Having taken them out, you now have 6 of the usual set of tetrominoes to put back in using the trademark flop moves.

First thing to do is find the possible assemblies of which there are 14. Obviously the restricted entry helps limit the numbers and you also need to decide whether Volker would stoop so low as to use the side hole of the box to place the last piece. So how should you go about narrowing down the assemblies? I got slightly lucky and managed it after a few hours of trying random positions before realising that the most important thing to do was to leave enough space for the insertion of the pieces that can only be rotated into the box.

The Aha! moment is wonderful with this puzzle. It’s yet another example of Volker’s genius mind. It’s not too horrendous and very very clever. Having solved it, I then had to try and find the delivery assembly all over again. Brilliant fun!

Centrifuge

Centifuge by Lucie Pauwels

This lovely little challenge from Lucie Pauwels has been made in a gorgeous red grained Merbau and a very white contrasting Ash. It consists of a square frame surrounding a 3x3x3 hole to be filled with the unusually shaped pieces. There are holes in each other the 4 walls of the frame which need to be filled once the pieces are packed.

I spent a good 15 minutes trying to construct a 3x3x3 cube which could fit inside before I sheepishly came to the realisation that a) this was impossible and b) would make the holes in the frame totally superfluous. Having had my eejit moment I then looked at constructing the shapes that would fit inside. This is a nice intuitive challenge because the pieces have ½ voxels sliced off in strategic places which really narrows down the possible arrangements. Obviously it is important that none of the ½ voxels are visible from above or below or in the holes and this adds to the challenge.

Very clever solution

This is not terribly tough but the sequence is clever and the aha! moment is very nice. It’s especially good if you don’t waste your time trying to do the impossible!

Shiba Inu

Shiba Inu (Limba version)

Garapa version - deliberately not showed off the shape of the dog

Here we have a couple of challenges in one from the amazing Girish Sharma. It’s a 6 piece burr with a single solution (no key piece) and then a 7 piece burr with the addition of the little dog inside the burr. Jakub and team have created two versions of this one. One made from a gorgeous Garapa and the other from a beautifully grained Limba. These are sent out as assembly challenges which will cause you some significant difficulty.

You would think that I, as a self confessed burr lover, would find this easy, but you’d be completely wrong. I may adore burrs (especially those that are part of the burr zoo) but I am awful at assembling them from scratch. I’m more of a puzzler who works to disassemble them and gain a muscle memory to help with reassembly (or I resort to Burrtools). I have multiple burrsets and yet still struggle to assemble a standard 6 piece burr - especially if the level is greater than 1 (hence the key piece comment). I started work on this one morning and it took me a whole 2 days to find even one assembly of the 6 piece burr. I was only able to do it because the solution that I found had a level 1.2 solution (i.e. it had a key piece that didn’t look like a solid key piece). Yes, I had found the simplest possible assembly of the 6 piece burr. Once I disassembled it and set the pieces out on a table in the correct orientation, I realised that there was no space inside for the doggie. There must be at least one more assembly that has a different interior cavity. It had taken me 2 days just to find one simple one - this was going to be a puzzle for Burrtools.

Not quite there!

Just the 6 piece burr assembled

Luckily I love making BT files and this was a nice easy one. The fabulous computer program showed me that there were 14 solutions to the 6 piece burr and only one of them was able to contain the dog. There was no way I would find the assembly myself so I used BT to tell me which burr sticks went where and after a good few hours managed to assemble the complete 7 piece burr. There is a nice little surprise for you when you do get it together (no spoiler here though).

Lisa and Lottie

Lisa and Lottie by Dr Volker Latussek

Remove the pieces this way

This incredible piece of puzzle analysis by Dr Latussek is definitely one for the collection of the hard-core puzzler. It is not for the faint-hearted - it is difficult…really REALLY difficult! The Pelikan team have made this exquisite puzzle from Bubinga with an Elm box.

Unusually for one of Volker’s creations it is sent out completely assembled in the box. The entry hole seems much much larger than the usual we have seen for the Flop series which gave me hope…until I tried to take them out of the box. I managed to take 4 of them out and then got stuck - are there rotations? No matter what I tried, I could not rotate any of the remaining pieces at all. This was very odd. Jakub never makes mistakes like this so I had a closer look and I then noticed that one of the sides of the boxes was removable. Once I had actually seen all the pieces, I had a bit of a panic! There were a lot of pieces and they were quite complex.

Volker said this about the puzzle:

“_Some of my puzzles start with a complete set of pieces, for each of which I have looked for a matching box to formulate a packing problem. Published examples of this are YIN YANG (6), TETRA-FLOP (8) and today LISA AND LOTTIE (10).
For LISA AND LOTTIE, Toshiaki Betsumiya had already proposed a complete set of ten pieces with GEMINI in 1987, each consisting of two half cubes (0.5x1x1) with a common contact area of at least one quarter (0.5x0.5). A few years ago, I initially asked myself which eight pieces could be packed into the cube-shaped box (2x2x2) of CASINO. At that time, I had to find the answer with the help of a self-written Fortran program in order to be able to present the BOX (2.5x2x2) for the ten pieces today.
There are 25 ways to build a corresponding cuboid (2.5x2x2), but only one way to put the pieces through the opening - which is the reason why I asked Pelikan to make a small batch of LISA AND LOTTIE. The uniqueness of the solution is very surprising to me, as I assumed there was no solution, even though the opening (1.5x2) is impressively large.
If you are willing to look at the ten pieces and how they interact, you will find the solution. Along the way, you can store the ten pieces in the box. _”

All ways to join 2 1x2x2 tetrominoes

This meant that if I could find one of the 25 possible cuboid assemblies then at least I could get it back inside. Off I went on my search. So far I have been totally unable to assemble even a cuboid to put back through side of the box, let alone find a way to put them all in through the hole in the top. I made a BT file for this one and found that the assembly in the box is not possible without some rotations so even if you do cheat a little bit then there is still going to be a huge challenge for you - there are 25 assemblies and 4 possible orientations of each to try. 100 possibilities even with the actual assembly shown is definitely a massive task. I am saving this for when I have a LOT of time on my hands. This is an incredible piece of puzzle analysis and something for the true puzzler.

Open Frame

Open Frame by Lucie Pauwels

This is a second of these amazing challenges by Lucie Pauwels to match the Minimal Frame from the last release. Like its' predecessor, it is a very colourful 2D packing puzzle with multiple different woods combined with an anti-slide puzzle using a very minimal frame but this time the edges of the frame are formed by single voxel pieces in the centre of each side (unlike the last one which had only 2 corner pieces). There are 9 pieces to be fit inside the 7x7 square. There is an overlap between the two puzzles with some shared pieces but the very simple ones are different.

Close but not there

I went to work and yet again, realised that tray packing puzzles are very difficult for me. I did manage after an hour or so to find a single assembly. It is oddly difficult to place these pieces into such an open tray. Like the Minimal frame, I was able to get many not quite there solutions but actually making the complete square shape proved very tough. The solution I found was satisfying but it did not fulfil the anti slide requirement. There are 2 pieces in the puzzle which must be oriented in a certain way to prevent them slipping out an edge or you must find a way to confine them to the interior of the assembly shape. 

A quick resort to Burrtools showed me that there are 15 possible assemblies of the square but only one of them is also anti-slide. I won’t show the final solution but once you look at it, it is a marvellous thing to behold! This is a huge challenge and very attractive! If you have the Minimal Frame then you owe it to yourself to get this one to go with it.

X-Ray

X-Ray byBenjamin Heidt

This beautiful creation made from Wenge, Purpleheart and Maple is the sixth of the puzzles from Jakub designed by Benjamin Heidt. Like most of his designs there is always something different and clever about them and this is no exception. It looks like a standard 6 piece burr made with tubular burr sticks, except there are 10 sticks in total, with 4 of them split into 2 halves. It is designed so that you can see right through it to work out what is going on inside, hence the name. Being based on a 12x12x12 grid it might give you an idea that there could be some rather involved movements and you wouldn't be wrong. My initial exploration managed to move the pieces a long way apart whilst still interlocked and nowhere to go.

Almost there? Not a chance!

Interestingly, there are very few blind ends in dismantling this one and those that there are, are relatively short. The challenge here is to find the pathway. The hollow nature of the sticks means that you can see almost everything but despite this I got blocked on numerous occasions. Part of the reason for this is the rather sharp internal edges which need very precise alignment but once you think that you can see a move, stick with it, make sure it's all aligned correctly and it goes very smoothly. Whilst the level is a pleasant 14.2.3.2.1.1.1.2, it is a really good challenge to effectively work your way through the maze. I find that for complex burrs the teens and twenties is just about right for an enjoyable experience.

Brilliant clever design

These wonderful puzzles should go on sale at Pelikan's website on Wednesday, 13th November at 10am CET (9am GMT, 4am EST & 1am PST). Whilst you are there, there are still a few copies of the wonderful Sukiyaki which I reviewed here and Benjamin's incredible Steam Boat which I reviewed here.