Pelikan Final Release of 2024

Puzzles just released by Pelikan puzzles

This may well be a little late for many of you who don't keep an eye out on the Pelikan website or follow me on Facebook. I received a package out of the blue about 10 days ago and had very little time at first to do any more than open it and take my photos. I am definitely not clever enough to solve all of these challenging puzzles in just 5 days and Jakub wanted to get them up for sale before he and his team go off on their well-earned Christmas break. These puzzles went up for sale on Thursday and I'm afraid that at least 2 are sold out already. If there is anything that you particularly want to buy then keep an eye on the auction sites or see whether Jakub might agree to make another batch - sometimes if enough people ask then he does get agreement from the designers to make a few more.

In this release there are some truly stunning and clever designs:
Minima Smiley by Frederic Boucher
Trimini Frame by Lucie Pauwels
Euklid's Cabrio by Dr Volker Latussek
Nested Soma by Dr Volker Latussek with Lucie Pauwels
Lunchbox by George Miller

Minima Smiley

There have been quite a lot of Minima puzzles over the last few years. The series started out as fun small packing puzzles with relatively simple pieces to fit in a small box with restricted entry and usually some odd holes or slots to allow rotations to occur. I have now bought lots and lots of these and thoroughly love the combination of thought, fiddling and Aha! moments. Several other designers have jumped on the Minima bandwagon and I have, of course, added these to my collection (partially thanks to Tye Stahly's Nothing Yet Designs site as well as Jakub and Jaroslav's Pelikan puzzles. 

When I received this one, I really wasn't sure what to make of it. All the pieces were inside and there seemed to be a ball in there too as well as a bolt in the side. What on earth was going on here. It cannot be a packing puzzle - is it an unpacking puzzle? Does such a thing exist? It would appear that Frederic has branched out into other genre's again (remember the amazing Res Q and my own special Visitor Q?) This time the aim is to work out how to release the ball.

Initially only the ball moves from one empty space to another but no further than that and therefore the only thing available to me was to remove the bolt. I got a bit of a surprise at the sheer length of it! After removal, there was suddenly the ability to slide a piece around and this opened up a bit of pathway for the ball. Except it wouldn't go very far and then nothing else happens. I was able to work out what the shapes were inside the box and map them out - there is absolutely no way any more is going to happen. Now I know that Frederic is a sneaky so and so and Jakub is very happy to encourage this sneakiness. A little exploration with fingers revealed something interesting and also some rather strong magnets. a tiny bit more progress happens but I get stuck again. Whilst exploring at this point, I realise that a piece can rotate and I eagerly encourage it only to find it doesn't really help me. Once I realised this, I tried to get it all back to the start and, OMG, it wouldn't go! Cue, minor panic before I got it all reset after 15 minutes of swearing at myself whilst Mrs S giggled at me and said that I don't seem to be very good at this puzzling business - oh, the shame!

I was stumped and had to draw the shapes and the box to work out a possible alternative sequence. Only after I had drawn it out was I able to make further steps and I could see the reason for the name of the puzzle:

Now I have to get the little bugger back inside

Having taken my photo, I tried to reset it, only to hear a lout "clack!" as the pieces reset themselves. OMG, my heart leapt into my throat again and I was forced to work it out from scratch again. For a while I kept trying it wrong and repeatedly heard that clack again and again until I realised the move needed to prevent it.

This is wonderful - very clever and shows that Frederic is able to set his talented brain to all types of puzzle. It has been absolutely beautifully made by Pelikan in Mahogany and Maple.

Trimini Frame

Trimini Frame by Lucie Pauwels

There have been a couple of incredible packing puzzle/antislide puzzles by Lucie this year (Minimal Frame and Open Frame which is still available as I type). I really struggled even to solve the basic packing element of these and completely failed with both of them to solve the antislide challenge. I was amazed at the last MPP when Wil Strijbos sidled up to me and showed me the he had solved it in about 10 minutes. I shouldn't have been surprised as the man is a total genius at design and solving. That display made me all the more determined to succeed at the latest of the challenges. Based on a triangular grid there are 8 oddly shaped pieces to place in a frame with only a single triangular voxel at the corner to hold the pieces in place.

Pepper Castor (another triangular grid)

This time I decided to be more analytical rather than just randomly place pieces in the tray. My usual approach to packing puzzles really isn't terribly efficient. A little trial and error revealed that certain pieces would either have to be oriented a particular direction if the abutted an edge or they would need to be positioned in the interior. This realisation was the key and significantly decreased the number of random moves. It didn't make it easy by any stretch but a true analytical approach made this solvable even by an eejit like me! After about 30 minutes of swearing under my breath, I had a true Aha! moment and it was solved. Absolutely wonderful to play with a triangular grid for once (very few designers do this - the best that I can recall is Alexander Magyaric's Play-girl and Play-boy puzzles as well as his Pepper Castor). There are still 13 in stock as I type - well worth buying to challenge yourself and even non-puzzlers.

Euklid's Cabrio

Euklid's Cabrio by Dr Volker Latussek

This is the second in the Cabriolet series from Dr Latussek. The use of the sliding-lid box has been used before by Hajime Katsumoto and Mineyuki Uyematsu with Slide Packing which I wrote about in 2016. The original Cabrio was a wonderful challenge on similar lines with Volker's own little twist. Of course, Volker is always exploring variations on what he has done before and surprisedmhimself when he found a way to use the Euclid type blocks with the Cabrio style box and we have an incredible challenge as a result which will really keep you think©ing for a while.

Interesting pieces

On arrival the lid is just sitting on top of the pieces and there's no way to slide it on. The aim is to find out which pieces go in the lid and which in the base which will allow it to slide together. A quick exploration revealed to me a really nice looking arrangement of the pieces which would fill those criteria. It looked beautiful! You knew as soon as you read that, that my arrangement was going to be wrong. Volker would never let the obvious solution be the correct one! I spent a good hour or so desperately trying to get that to work and it was totally impossible! The sliding pieces just wouldn't reach far enough to allow subsequent pieces to go in. Think©! There must be another way. 

Not only is this a packing puzzle...this is a sliding piece puzzle. Getting everything in place is going to need careful placement and then careful jiggling about inside to make room for subsequent pieces. I needed another couple of days to figure this one out in my head (luckily there is plenty of space in there). I let out a huge shout when I finally closed the box with all the pieces inside - that man is a genius!

Make sure that you pay proper attention to what you do and how the pieces sit inside because it will require an exact sequence of moves to get them out again and initially you will be blind with a box that is closed or only opens a little bit. As you would expect, I got the box stuck in the closed position for a panicked hour as I shook it about and desperately tried to work out how to open the bloody thing! I actually had to sit down for a bit and think to open it and felt a sudden urge for a gin when I finally did it. I have managed it a few times since then and it is incredibly clever. This is an essential to all followers of Volker and all packing aficionados. 

Nested Soma

Nested Soma - a collaboration by Lucie Pauwels and Dr Volker Latussek

Lucie has recently designed a new puzzle in the Minima series, the Minima nest (I haven't gotten around to it yet), and she decided to try and create a bigger version using a shifted 3x3x3 box. When Volker saw the puzzle idea, he suggested that she try and use slightly altered Soma pieces and sent her a couple of designs for the pieces and then the Nested Soma was born.

The manufacturing skill for this puzzle is totally off the scale! It is stunning made from Elm and Bubinga. The puzzle screams to fit the pieces inside and as you do so it quickly gets blocked up leaving spaces inside that cannot be reached. Time to solve it outside of the box and then you realise that it isn't very stable when the pieces are piled up on a table or your lap. A combination approach would be good. My trial and error approach rapidly failed. There are some very peculiar shapes which have to be fitted into a very restricted part of the box and quite quickly I saw that one piece could only fit in a particular orientation and, gulp, it needed a rotational move - Burrtools won't help much here.

I spent about an hour having increasingly useful breakthroughs and inched my way forwards progressively. The final Aha! moments are delicious. I have posted the solved puzzle because it appears on the Pelikan page - it's a minimal spoiler as most of it cannot be seen.

Solved - really not much of a spoiler here

Lunchbox

Lunchbox by George Miller

I think this might be my first puzzle by George which is strange because he has been very prolific for a very long time. Recently he and Roxanne have been focussed on creating the greatest puzzle museum in the world. 

George wrote this about it:

"Lunchbox is a variation of a puzzle I found in a pile of puzzles I had purchased in Prague. One of the puzzles was simply 10 pieces of wood with no clue as to the goal. I guessed it had to be a symmetric solid shape and began to explore all of the possibilities. This was, in essence, a meta puzzle – that is – and the goal, then solve the puzzle by stacking the pieces into the shape of the goal. The ten pieces were all the ways four 2 unit squares of one unit thickness could be glued together at with two unit cubes cubes glued to the squares to form a checkered patterns on each piece.

I made a copy of the ten pieces on a 3D printer. I used BurrTools to test using these ten pieces to pack a 4x5x3 shape I called a “sandwich”. I forced the squares to the top and bottom and the red cubes to the middle making it look ever so much like a jelly sandwich.

A simple packing puzzle is fun, but making a good puzzle involves a presentation mode plus a theme or story. A presentation mode too often is simply the solved puzzle. This takes away the pleasure of a discovered solution. Again, using BurrTools I found a solid packing of a set of steps with a unique solution. This led to the development of a box in the shape of a lunch pail with the inside conforming to the shape of the set of stairs. The story then becomes that of a young lad taking to school a lunchbox prepared by his mother. When he opens the box he finds his lunch in many pieces he has to pack together into a delicious sandwich before eating his lunch. Putting the pieces back into the lunchbox presents a puzzle unto itself."

This challenge is incredibly well presented - it arrives in one of the solved positions with the pieces packed in the box. Tipping them out reveals the wonderful variety of ways that 2 cubies can be placed on the 4 tetrominoes with gaps.

All the tetrominoes with checkerboard patterns

The first challenge is to create a sandwich from the contents of the lunchbox. Jakub has made the pieces in such a way that it looks like a piece of meat between 2 slices of white bread. I initially attempted to make it so that only checkerboard pieces were next to each other. This seriously restricted the pieces that I could try in each position but left me unable to form the 4x5x3 shape. Once I had determined that it might be impossible with pure checkerboard positioning, I looked at other arrangements and with some thought created lunch:

One ham sandwich

Burrtools tells me that there are another 3 ways to make my sandwich - I will keep working on it. Getting the pieces back into the box has so far proven impossible for me. I know the shape to achieve and it is not a simple cuboid which seems to be confusing me. I will be using Burrtools in the meantime. 

Unlike the sandwich, the orientation of the white bread is not all in the same direction which seems to confuse my feeble brain a lot. It is very similar to the Tabula cubes I wrote about way back in 2013 which I really struggled with:

Tabula cube 1	Tabula cube 2
Tabula cube 1 pieces	Tabula cube 2 pieces

These puzzles are selling very fast - order them quick if you don't want to miss out. They are all amazing. My favourites are Minima Smiley, Nested Soma and Euklid's Cabrio.