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.

It Seems That Less Is Definitely More

Having Less pieces seems to make things more difficult!

 

J1GSAW by Haym Hirsh from Nothing Yet Designs

Recently I have been buying and playing with a whole bunch of very complex puzzles. This includes the Who Dares Wins from Shane and the Two Brass Monkeys, the Ant Hunt from Boaz Feldman, Chained Key from Luke Waier, Blinded from Dee Dixon, the Box of Celts from Numbskull puzzles and the Fibonacci Box from Jesse Born. I have been playing with these amazing puzzles and getting absolutely nowhere with any of them! I am beginning to think that I have lost my puzzling mojo yet again. Mrs S is starting to say that if I can't solve anything then I really shouldn't buy them. Whilst I protest that I don't know that I can't solve them until after I have actually received them, I am actually beginning to think that she might be right. 😱

Having failed so badly at these puzzles, I went back to something "simple". Except maybe they are not simple! Haym Hirsh, as well as being the head honcho in the Mechanical puzzle community FB group, is also a superb puzzle designer of apparently simple designs which have a hidden twist to them. Recently, he has been producing some lovely little Jigsaw puzzles along the lines of those we have come to love from Yuu Asaka. In this case, Haym has made a few with varying numbers of pieces. The 4 pieces challenge was sent back to Blighty in Ali's suitcase for me and I will be picking it up at the next MPP but I have been playing with the 5 and 10 piece Jigsaws for the last few weeks or so.

Jig5aw by Haym

I had tried and failed the Jig5aw a month or so ago and had spread it far and wide at work in the hope that someone else might manage to educate me in how to solve these apparently easy challenges. Having received it at the beginning of September, it had remained unsolved.

In desperation I picked up the 10 piece puzzle and had little hope for success. After all, if I can't pack 5 pieces then I stand no chance on 10! The frame is much bigger than expected when putting an array of pieces inside but it quickly becomes clear that a simple solve is not possible:

Lots of space but not quite enough

Unusually for me, I looked at this attempted solution and had a "what if I do this?" thought. As a man who is most unaccustomed to thoughts, this really caught me by surprise. I rearranged a few of the pieces and opened up some space and it didn't solve it but left me with space for another of those rogue thoughts. After 10 minutes, I had actually solved it - Yay! Has my mojo come back? Maybe just for Jigsaw packing puzzles?

Quick...get the Jig5aw challenges out: There are 3 colours to try, each with their own challenge. 5 pieces to fit in the tray. It is quite easy to get almost there:

Orange - almost there?

Yellow - not even nearly

Red - this is bloody impossible!

I have spent a few days doing the same things over and over again and if I wasn't insane beforehand then I am rapidly approaching it! How can a 5 piece jigsaw be so damned difficult?

I have managed to solve the orange version which is the only thing that has reclaimed the remnants of my sanity. I have had lots of really really good ideas for the red and yellow challenges. The only problem  being that my really good ideas have all been wrong. Despite "only" being a jigsaw and despite "only" having 5 pieces, this is a really good puzzle. It is perfect for experienced puzzlers but also a wonderful introduction to non-puzzlers to try and get them hooked on our addiction.

At the moment the 5 piece puzzle is solved out at Nothing Yet Designs but I am sure that if enough of you badger Tye, then he might deign to make some more copies.

Thank you Haym and Tye for making me mental. I do the ECT list in Sheffield on a Friday morning and may well volunteer for a zap or two myself after this! 🤪