Pelikan Goes Minima(l)

Pelikan upcoming puzzles in April

It's always a great but scary day in the PuzzleMad HQ when a big blue box arrives from the Czech Republic! I am always delighted to see the delivery man (and he seems pleased to see me too) but Mrs S is much less happy about it. She knows that there will be a pile of puzzles lying around for a while to be solved and me making funny noises and pained faces as I struggle to solve them within a deadline. She always complains about the progressive buildup of toys but I think they look gorgeous and also they keep me out of mischief which should make her happy. Whack! Ouch!....or maybe not!

The delivery this time included:

Minima 1 to 4 from Frederic Boucher

Minima Smiley from Frederic Boucher in Acrylic as well as a re-release of the wood version

L'Escargot from Jorgos Anastasou

Farmacia by Dr Volker Latussek

Minima One to Four

The first four Minima puzzles

Now this is very exciting! I have previously written about the Minima series from Frederic Boucher. I do seem to have reviewed quite a lot of his puzzles over the last year or so - he is just so talented at creating designs that are simple looking but having a tremendous yet still accessible challenge. Here is another chance for you to get a copy of the whole set of 12 Minima puzzles over the next few releases. They were originally released by Tye Stahly and sold out completely more than once. Apparently these are quite difficult to manufacture and both Tye and Jakub have stated that they are really tough. 

Jakub and Jaroslav plan to create these in batches of 4 to be bought as a set or individually. This month will start with the first 4 which are definitely a great challenging introduction to the series. They have been created with a bunch of different woods which make them stunning on display. They are made with the following wood combinations:

Minima 1 - Elm and Wenge

Minima 2 - Walnut and Acacia

Minima 3 - Purpleheart and Ash

Minima 4 - Jatoba and Padauk

The aim is to pack all the pieces into the boxes with all holes covered when packed. Like most of Frederic's puzzles, some very interesting and hard to find rotations are required. They get progressively more difficult from Minima 1 to 4 and are made all the harder with the Pelikan versions because having a wooden box which you cannot see through means that you really have to plan your approach before starting to place the pieces inside. After the second piece is inserted it gets increasingly difficult to place others and you cannot see what is causing the blockage. Also the precision of the manufacture and the fact that the wooden box is less slidey than acrylic ones means that any rotations need to be very precisely placed or they will not work. 

I had to solve all four of them again from scratch as I had no recollection of the solutions from before (don't tell Mrs S that I only need about 10 puzzles to be solved over and over again!) They are such fun and this explains why I have a HUGE collection of these Minima puzzles of varying types and from various designers. Basically I will purchase any of them when released to add to my collection. I would say that these are ESSENTIAL purchases for anyone seriously into packing puzzles - they are stunningly beautiful and a fabulous challenge!

Minima Smiley

Acrylic version

Re-released wooden version

The Minima Smiley was first released in December of last year and along with the rest of the Boucher Minima's made it to my Top 10 puzzles of the year. It was so good I actually spent several paragraphs gushing about how it challenged me and scared me half to death as the magnets inside caused various things to clack together unexpectedly. This time the Pelikan team are re-releasing the original version in wood (Mahogany and Maple with a Yellowheart smiley ball) and also an identical one with a see-through acrylic box and Bubinga pieces. They both solve the same way but obviously one is solved blind by deduction and the other is entirely visible. The solution is fabulous and classic Boucher with a wonderful set of Aha! moments.

Which should you buy? The wooden one is the most puzzling but the see-through version is wonderful to watch as you manipulate the pieces. You obviously need both in your collection!

L'Escargot

L'Escargot by Jorgos Anastasou

This is the second puzzle for Jorgos Anastasou and is a wonderful animal shaped burr. We have a wonderful snail which is asymmetric  like the delicious escargot we can eat. This is different to Pelikan's earlier snail puzzle of their own design which is more of a sequential assembly/disassembly puzzle. 

Pelikan have made this with a wonderful smooth and tactile Walnut and Zebrano shell and an Ash body (there are some Wenge eyes too).

Obviously, the aim is to dismantle it and then reassemble it. Of course, the next part of the fun is creating your own Burrtools file for it as well. Maybe you can manage the reassembly before the BT file? The disassembly is a fun sequence of moving parts of the shell as well as the body around and gradually you can see an opening come into play which will allow the first piece to be removed. Even after removing the first piece it is still a challenge to remove the next and then the others are much simpler. The disassembly sequence is a perfect level 14.11.4.3 giving you some rather complex looking pieces:

Huge fun

I actually managed to keep the pieces in a reasonable orientation and position to be able to reassemble without resorting to a BT file but I doubt I could do it if I had scrambled the pieces. I am sure that all of you would easily manage to do it though.

Farmacia

Farmacia by Dr Volker Latussek

This is not even a complete disassembly

The Farmacia by Dr Latussek is absolutely gorgeous with a box made from Acacia and vibrant Padauk pieces to be placed inside.

It arrived with the pieces formed into a cube that slotted into the box but did not fit flush to the bottom. The aim is to remove the cube of pieces and reassemble it into the box so that they all sit flush with the top of the box.

 Only when I took the first few pieces out did I realise why it was standing proud - each of the packing pieces are L-shaped Triominoes. Each of these triominoes has a central cubie which is solid and attached at each end to two others. One end-cubie has a hole drilled into one of the faces and the other end-cubie on the other end has a protruding short dowel which fits inside the drilled holes (these are also at varying positions on the faces). There is also a single hole in the centre of the base of the box and a single dowel in the centre of one wall (pictured left).

This puzzle is not for the faint-hearted! Having taken the pieces out of the box for my photo, I couldn't actually recreate the cube shape to get them all back in again. So far I have been experimenting with the various ways that these can be assembled into shapes and how to build up bigger shapes. I suspect that this will be a huge logic puzzle very similar to the Logical Progression puzzle from the late Eric Fuller which took me over a year to solve. This will require some proper thought and planning to solve. So far I have not managed anything yet but I will keep at it. So should you, it is beautiful and a very tough challenge.