He Risks A Whack! Ouch!

But He "Creeps" Past It! Phew!

This required wine...LOTS of wine

When Mine offers puzzles, most of us say yes and we wait for a bit for hime to manufacture said puzzles and postage occurs when you least expect it. My package went into my tracking app and for some reason went from Japan to China and then on to India. I have no idea why - my knowledge of shipping lanes and flight paths is sketchy to say the least but even I know that is an odd path to take to the UK. The tracking stopped in India for a week or so and I resigned myself to waiting for a long time. The app and the Yamato website had no further updates. In the meantime...

Tye Stahly also manufactures some new toys and puts them up for sale. The UK puzzlers have a good thing going as he combines them all together into what I imagine is a shipping container which heads towards Allard's house and very forgiving wife (Gill is an angel!) I knew the shipping container had set off but I didn't know more. It must have been a very fast ship or maybe even one of those airyplane things because after just a few days from going on sale to somehow being forwarded on by the PuzzleMan himself to arriving at PuzzleMad HQ was incredibly fast. 

Both boxes arrived on the same day and due to work commitments, I didn't get to open them straight away. I have worked yet another 6 day week and "she who must be feared" got fed up having two medium sized boxes sitting in the porch cluttering up the place. She obviously hadn't thought it through properly because boxes in the porch don't really count as clutter. It's only when you open said boxes to find a total of 16 new puzzling toys on the kitchen work surface that you realise what clutter is! Whack! Ouch!

Yes, she actually opened the boxes for me and laid out the pile o' puzzles on the kitchen granite for me. When I got home from work on Saturday, she stood there glaring at me and menacingly tapped her foot whilst I made excuses. In the end I couldn't really think of any decent excuses and offered her wine to make up for it. This mollified her a little bit so I tried more wine but it didn't help much and I suspect I'm going to suffer in the near future. To try and improve the situation, I have taken my photos and have endeavoured to stash them somewhere not cluttered until I have had a chance to play. Phew! I might have got away with it. Whack! Ouch! Maybe not...

The first one I have tried was one by the amazing Yuu Asaka. I couldn't resist the Creep 2 puzzle which looked so different from his usual packing puzzles:

Creep 2 pieces

The stated aim on the box (the puzzles from Yuu-san are always beautifully presented) is to insert the two sliders completely inside the tray.

It is only a level 2 out of 5 and the expected puzzling time should be about 20 minutes according to the designer. Well we will see about that! I am famous/infamous for taking days or weeks instead of minutes.

This puzzle reminded me very much of a wonderful puzzle by Robrecht Louage, the Cerradura Doble.

Off we go...

The gaps in the frame at each edge are different sizes which should give a clue to which pieces go where and indeed, I was able to quite quickly determine then final position of the two sliders. There's nothing else to do other than to slide them each inside in turn and look at how they will interact as you move the pieces back and forth. At this point, I realised that Yuu-san is what is known in the trade as a "sneaky bugger"! I spent the full amount of time (20 minutes) trying the same thing over and over again but it just wouldn't work. Did I have the wrong pieces? I actually checked the pieces against on-line photos and there was no mistake - silly me ( or...I'm an eejit).

Time to think© and it hurt a bit. Eventually, I had an aha! moment when I realised my initial supposition had been incorrect. Once I had made my discovery, I had my solved puzzle and it's really quite satisfying. The whole puzzle seems to be about misdirection. The design makes you think the wrong thing and if you are anything like me, you will be stuck on that wrong thought for a while before eventually forcing yourself to look further. It is really very clever and almost perfect for newbies or visitors to the house who you would like to bamboozle. I think I will take it to work to torture people for a while. Hopefully Mrs S will not murder me when she sobers up/regains consciousness from the barrel of wine I have had to ply her with!

If you are wanting to buy a copy then PuzzleMaster has it for sale here and you could even buy the rest of Yuu-san's puzzles at the same time. In the UK you could try JPGames or Crux puzzles.