Pelikan Summer Release 2025

Upcoming Puzzles From Pelikan

Yes, if you have been watching my new stuff page or my FB page then you will have seen that quite a few new toys have arrived at PuzzleMad HQ over the last month or so and Mrs S has become increasingly irritated with me. The camel's back very nearly snapped at the end of last week when I had to admit to her that there might be another delivery from Jakub, Jaroslav and team whilst I was at work last week. My incipient murder was delayed by a plane malfunction in Germany and the promised big box didn't arrive on time. The end result was that it was delayed until last Monday and I was working from home - no there were no knee replacements on the kitchen table! I was doing committee work on the dreaded MS Teams - 😱. The arrival of the box was beautifully timed between meetings and I managed to intercept it and secrete it away before there was an explosion! Phew.

The downside of the delayed flight was that I had much less time to play. I have only managed to solve 4 of the 8 arrivals so far. Hopefully the rest will be ready for next Sunday.

The Bunch 2.2

The Bunch 2.2 by Alfons Eyckmans

This gorgeous cube is another of a long line of amazing interlocking puzzles from the Master, Alfons Eyckmans. I have quite a few of these now, both direct from him, as well as versions from Pelikan and they are always great fun to play with as well as looking fabulous on display. This one is very attractive made from Wenge, Maple and Purpleheart. It is a simpler design than many of the others but this makes for a rather nice exploration and solve. 

My first time dismantling it I found a rather nice rotational shortcut but quickly put the piece that is removed back in the puzzle as I know that Alfons tends not to like rotational solutions. The first piece comes out nice and logically and opens up quite a lot of movement but for a while I was missing the key move that would allow me to progress. It was a nice surprise when I found it and even then the next part was not obvious. The puzzle does reveal the inner locking mechanism and that helps you plan the next few moves. 

It's going to be fun putting this back together

Having disassembled it, then is definitely a fun challenge to scramble the pieces and then reassemble after the memory of the disassembly has faded. Great fun! If you love cuboid interlocking puzzles and Alfons' work interests you then this is a brilliant one for your collection.

Rising Peaks - Everest

Rising Peaks - Everest by Girish Sharma

This is another of Girish Sharma's amazing interlocking cube creations.  Judging from the name Rising Peaks hyphenated with a mountain name, I suspect this is the first in a whole series of these puzzles - I certainly hope so! Beautifully made using Padauk, Wenge, Acacia and Maple, the initial challenge is to separate the pieces from their travel assembly. Maybe I'm not very good at puzzles (it does say that all over my website) but I actually took a good 5 minutes taking it apart. Then obviously you have to assemble them into a 4x4x4 cube using linear moves only. Many puzzlers have moved away from solely linear interlocking puzzles but I still love the standard interlocking puzzles that I first learned about so many years ago from Richard Gain. They provide a wonderful challenge and can be quite tough. This one is absolutely superb. 

From the beginning it is very easy to establish the positions of the 4 pieces but actually assembling them is a tremendous fun challenge. Working out which pieces to use first and which subsequently get inserted is part of the difficulty. There is no obvious order when looking at the shapes and in fact the required order was a bit of a surprise to me. At first it's possible to place any 3 pieces in a promising arrangement but the final one ain't going nowhere! I spent a good 45 minutes trying various arrangements of the first 2/3 pieces before I found a sequence that looked promising - something worthy of Girish' design skills. Once I'd found this start, I thought I was making progress until miraculously a piece fell out unexpectedly - I sort of lost track of what I was doing and ended up back at the beginning. Start again...

Continuing in my search I noticed a possible move that I had missed the first time and that opened up a whole set of dance moves of the pieces in an out around each other. The Pelikan team have made this beautifully tight so the pieces don't flop about and each move has to be made deliberately with the occasional "thwack" as they settle in to place. I had my cube assembled in about an hour. 

There is NO spoiler here - the relative positions of the pieces are really obvious

Having taken my photos, I then struggled to dismantle the puzzle and put it back into the storage/travel position. It's a disassembly challenge as well as an assembly one. I redid it a few hours later and even though I remembered the vague order of the pieces, it still took me quite a while to repeat the process. 

This is another masterpiece of design and manufacture by Girish and Pelikan. If you like interlocking puzzles then this should be high on your shopping list.

Minima Magnetik

Minima Magnetik by Frederic Boucher

My goodness! Is there no end to Frederic's design skills and ideas?? Here we have yet another wonderful puzzle in the now enormous Minima series. I have written extensive reviews of Minima puzzles over the last couple of years and have to admit that this series is one of the single most compelling series I have ever played with. I had thought that Frederic might run out of ideas but there seems to be no sign of it so far. The Pelikan team have made this version using Jatoba and Acacia woods with a bunch of magnets. This amazing design looks so simple until you casually have a play. The usual 2x2x3 box has two entry holes to it and what looks like some finger-holes as well. Anyone looking at these shapes (1x1x2 sticks) with a hole in one end and another at the front will be able to think of quite a few ways to get the pieces inside and think this is simplicity itself. I sort of thought so too until I received the instructions.

"First place the box on a flat surface.

Pack the pieces inside su that no magnets are visible through any holes in the box.

Once a piece has been placed in the box, you can not touch or move the pieces with your fingers or move the box"

Ah! Now we have an entirely new challenge! It is a simple packing but made challenging by the constraints. The magnets are obviously the key to manipulating the pieces. To add to the challenge the embedded magnets have their polarity arranged such that 4 of the pieces have one orientation, another the opposite way around and one piece has no magnet. First challenge is to decide which way around the box needs to be placed and then it will be necessary to use both repulsion and attraction to move the pieces around. If the pieces are placed through one hole and another piece placed through the other, then it is quite possible for a diagonal repulsion to occur and another piece placed to prevent this. There is a whole lot of challenge to this one.

I worked out an approach after about half an hour of fiddling out of the box and attempted to do it inside. This taught me that I needed to be very careful with the exact order that pieces need to be placed. I thought I had my solution and took this photo:

No magnets visible but....

Having been unaware that this design was being made by Jakub, I had ordered the same puzzle from Tye Stahly's Nothing Yet Designs store and had actually received his copy a few days earlier (thanks Allard, for forwarding it on to me). 

Minima Magnetik from Tye

I set about doing the same thing with the 3D printed version and, to my horror, it would not work! The repulsion of the magnets was not quite strong enough to achieve one of the crucial moves. This could only mean that my initial solution was not the intended one. It also means that you have two solutions to find if you buy the Pelikan version of this puzzle. I went back to the drawing board and have to shamefully admit that it took me another 2 days to find a solution that would work with both versions. The actual sequence of moves is really quite involved requiring multiple steps. This is a must have puzzle!

Minima Drawer

Minima Drawer by Frederic Boucher

This gorgeous creation is yet another Minima design by Frederic. It is also another of those must have puzzles. This version has been created using a very beautiful Leopard wood and Maple and is stunning. It arrives with the box completely closed and one L shaped piece outside. The drawer of the box can slide in either direction, although on arrival it can will only go one way and reveals a number of pieces inside. It's not straightforward removing all the pieces and requires the drawer to be moved in both directions to progressively release the pieces. Be careful! It's easy to get stuck!

Dowels galore!

Once you have all the pieces, the extent of the challenge becomes clear! There drawer is prevented from coming out by a one voxel dowel attached to the roof of the puzzle inside. There is also another one voxel dowel pointing horizontally inside the drawer. The pieces and extra dowels need to be placed inside the 2x2x3 cavity as usual. Having experienced the minor challenge of removing the pieces from the transport position, I knew that multiple moves would be required and sliding the drawer back and forth. Gravity was going to be a key consideration here. There are a few arrangements that will fit the space given but it is clear that most are not physically possible. The approach here has to be to find an assembly and then work backwards to see whether it can be removed from the box. 

No spoiler - it is solved!

I think I got somewhat lucky and found the solution after only a whole day of trying but on the way I nearly had a heart attack several times. The limited opening means that some of the pieces need to be rotated into the box and if they are not right or in the right order, they must be removed using the same rotation. Sometimes this can be very hard to achieve and leave you with a huge challenge and worry that you have trapped them inside permanently.

This one is a minima for true puzzle professionals - it is fabulous!

I will be working on the remaining 4 puzzles over the upcoming week and will finish the reviews next Sunday.

Did I Just Perform Animal Cruelty?

Tortoise Protocol By Junichi Yananose

Juno Does It Again

I missed out on the Hippo puzzle from Juno which was such a huge hit last year - it dropped at the wrong time for me due to a combination of finances and being too busy to pay proper attention. I was determined not to allow that to happen when the next of his fabulous sequential discovery puzzles dropped. I was poised, logged in and with Apple Pay ready to go. It was just as well that I took these precautions as I have never seen a production run sell out so quickly!

When it arrived, I was rather staggered at the sheer size and heft of it. It is 211 x 162 x 82mm across and weighs in at 870g. The sales spiel had mentioned that it was big and heavy but it really caught me by surprised. It may cause some storage problems but I am not going to think about that until someone who I am frightened of harangues me for leaving it lying around. It is rather stunning being made of PNG Rosewood (shell), Golden Sassafras (body), Silky Oak (limbs and head) as well as Jarrah, Iroko and Juno's often used beautiful plywood. There are also some brass pieces and a whole lot of magnets.

The aim is to find a cavity and a prize somewhere inside. Yes, there's a cavity and NO, it's not a box! The presence of a cavity does not automatically make everything a box. I myself have some cavities within me and I am definitely not a box!

Having received it, photographed it from a number of angles, it was time to torture the Tortoise. It sounds awful but if I was to get my prize from inside then I knew I had to do some awful things. Turning it over and over doesn't really reveal any suspicious noises of anything loose inside and pushing and pulling at limbs and shell does very little. However, if you poke a tortoise on his nose then what will he do? Yes, the obvious thing happens here:

Now you seem me...

Now you don't

After this a few more things are possible and you get to play "Pattycake" with your tortoise and on a few occasions a bit of the internals are briefly visible. I went around in circles for a while moving bits and then moving them back. The moves are rather satisfying and assisted by magnets inside. Up until this point, I was able to go back and forth to the beginning each time but seemed to be missing a critical move to progress. This was where I stopped for the first day.

Returning to it the next day, I used my Einsteinian approach for a bit until something spontaneously different happened - oooooh! Now I really had done something terrible to the poor creature:

That has got to have hurt!

All of a sudden, I could see the innards of a tortoise and just like my own innards, they aren't really intended for the world to see - so I won't be showing them to you! At this point, it's possible to see the sheer complexity of the puzzle and understand why it had taken Juno quite so long to design, perfect and manufacture them. The interior is an absolute masterpiece! Let's just say, more horrors are possible for the poor tortoise including amputatlion of all limbs and tail as well as decapitation. It's gruesome!

Having ripped all appendages off, hopefully to use as tools later, I decided to return it back to the beginning and got my first shock - I couldn't;d not close it up again. I thought I had understood the process but I had missed something and part of the reassembly was blocked. I was flummoxed for a while and was forced to Think© for a bit. Ouch! Eventually I saw through the fiendish design and was able to return to the beginning and leave it for another evening. This was proving to be real fun.

The following day, I quickly tore the tortoise to pieces and examined the interior to see where tools would be used. There were magnets, buttons that were sunken, buttons that were flush, it was beautiful. All you can do is push and prod a few bits to see what happens. Interestingly, you need to combine pushing stuff with specific orientation to make pieces shift inside. Initially, you can see the move but it doesn't seem to help get you any further along. Thinking© again and trying an old old trick reveals a new part of the interior and then brass pieces can be seen sliding around inside. The odd thing is that sometimes those brass things disappear and won't return.......until they do. Why???

I got stuck again at this point. There is an obvious thing to do but it wasn't doing anything until I did it again and it did. It caught me quite by surprise as a component shot out of the tortoise and landed in my lap. Juno did suggest solving this puzzle over a fusion ops folded bath towel and I agree - in the end there are quit a LOT of pieces which could easily be lost down a sofa if you are not careful. Having gotten this piece out, I was able to see a bit more of the interior but it didn't really help me and I was pretty stuck for a day or so. At some point, I must have manipulated a mechanism without realising it because after a couple of days of getting nowhere, I suddenly had a gorgeous piece of plywood in my lap and no idea how. It had quite obviously been held in place by a pin and that pin was nowhere to be seen. I frantically checked my lap, the sofa and the floor and couldn't find the pin. I had no idea where it was and had no way to put it back. Now I had no option but to continue to the end and hope that I would work out how I had achieved that step or I would not be able to reset.

I was able to see why one piece had been disappearing inside and only occasionally reappearing during the early part of the solve. I suddenly had an extra tool and an obvious place to use it. Another beautiful piece of plywood was revealed and I was stuck again. From now on, there was a lot of thinking, a lot of trying random ideas that wouldn't work until in desperation I tried the correct random thing. The progression over another few days was absolutely delightful. There are sliding pieces, magnetic locking mechanisms and even a lever to manipulate (once you have found the lever) and all of a sudden a cavity is found - not the cavity of a box, you understand... it's the cavity of a tortoise. I had my prize!

For some reason, I was expecting a loaf of bread!

This is an absolute Tour de force of puzzling! It is beautiful, well thought out, fabulously logical and worth every penny. It is absolutely certain to be in my next Top Ten(ish) of the year. Whether it makes it to number one depends on whether I manage to solve some of the other incredible puzzles I have received over the last few weeks. The Jukebox, the Moonage M5, the Ice Bucket, Dead Mortimer are all proving impossible for my feeble brain but I do hope that I might manage to solve one or two soon!

Thank you Juno and Yukari for an amazing odyssey!

Does Being Married Decrease Your Solving Ability?

Tortoise Protocol from Juno

Well! That was an inflammatory thing to write as a title! It might earn me a Whack! Ouch! but probably not as she never looks at my site. If one of you rats me out then I'll be very upset with you.

The reason for the title is that I have nothing solved to write about due to a combination of work (catching up after some annual leave has left me little time) and having a better half who insists on decorating the house periodically seems to get in the way of puzzling. Yes, she doesn't make me actually do the decorating but its the moving everything around from room to room and forcing me to tidy up my piles (yes, multiple) of puzzles to be solved gets in the way.

Then, it just happened to be our 31st wedding anniversary yesterday and that involved something really special and really time consuming - kittens! I married a crazy cat lady and we got our first cats 28 years ago in an attempt to prevent the further multiplication of cat pictures, porcelain cats, stone cats etc. It didn't really work very well as they still proliferated but at a slightly slower rate. Our last feline friend died last year and after a little break to get over it she decided (and yes, I did not disagree) that more were required. So, when the most international MPP of the year went ahead, I drove with a happy Mrs S to pick up Amenadiel and Mazikeen (I am sure you can work out where those names came from). I cannot leave much lying around for fear of it being chewed or batted around the kitchen floor and also have been "forced" to spend some time in the company of the crazy cat lady and her cats. It has been quite refreshing.

I have attempted some puzzling and made some progress but not much. My copy of Tortoise Protocol from Juno arrived and I have been working on it. Just as with the Hippo, you have to do some truly awful things to the poor tortoise but progress was being made...until it wasn't. I have found lots of pieces and things that happen but I've been stuck at a critical point for a week. Sigh!

The Clutch lock from Andrew Coles has been in my pile for weeks and weeks - I have made some real progress in that the lock is open - I am not entirely sure why but now it will not lock properly. Actually it will lock but I cannot remove the damn key. He's a devious bugger that Mr Coles as I have mentioned before. Allard has discussed this lock recently and loved it - I am not very bright and hopefully will love it in a year or 3 when I understand it. You should love it soon when he puts them up for sale.

How does being married interfere with this? She got very upset with the constant muttering and the loud click, clunk noises I was making as I repeatedly opened and closed the bloody thing.

The day before our wedding anniversary, a nice compact box arrived from China. It had some puzzles in it that I was hesitant to tell "her" about until she was in a very good mood. My latest batch from Aaron Wang arrived and, GULP, they are noisy jingly things! I'm hoping the cats love the sound and that will give me an excuse to play without being shouted at.

Trumpet

Double-Barre

These two named after musical instruments are "just" level 8 out of 10. I have started with Trumpet yesterday and today and after an hour, I wonder whether Aaron is a superhuman being. These are the easy ones and I still can't do them!

Luckily for me the cats are fascinated by the jingling!

Circuit Board I

Circuit Board II

These two are level 10 and look ferocious. I wasn't going to buy them but Aaron insisted that the solutions were truly something special and I would love them. I am sure he is right but I do not know if I will ever find the solution!

Grenade V

Grenade VI

I have no idea why I bought these! I guess it was to complete the set. I do own the Grenade I - IV as well and as far as I remember have only saved one of them! They are impossibly tough but they really are wonderful to look at. I did have a forlorn hope that maybe without string they might be less impossible? Doh!

French Horn

Galaxy I

Another music themed one but this time level 10 and something that looks like it will be in a knot in no time and with no quick release mechanism that may stay that way. Aargh!

Concertina Wire

Sweet Hug

I absolutely adore these wire puzzles with a base. They tend to be very N-ary but the complexity of the interlocking rings can make these incredibly difficult to follow the solution and I often find myself either hopelessly lost or back at the beginning. Some have some very complex movements which I am never able to find. These looked like the two most straightforward ones from the current batch - I have hope even if it's just a faint one!

Summer in the Xiaoshang Bridge

This is one of a series of four designed by Aaron himself. Looking at the picture, maybe I stand a small chance at solving it despite the level 10!

If you want some of these wire puzzles then some may still be available - contact Aaron via FB or via me.

Hopefully I will have a bit more time and success this week.

Shooting For The Moon With Stephan

Did Houston Or I Have A Problem?

Moonage M5 By Stephan Baumegger

Beautiful Purpleheart launcher

Stephan Baumegger progressed very rapidly a few years ago from a just a hobbyist puzzle designer and wood worker to one of the best in the world. He has been producing some of the most beautiful creations in the Burr, N-ary and Sequential discovery categories that I have ever seen. Each time he reveals a new set of creations on his PuzzleLeisure FB page, I add quite a few to my list and every time, I fail to buy before they sell out because quality doesn't come cheap and by the time I have scraped the money together, it's too late and I have to be aware that I am walking a very wobbly tightrope with Mrs S and if too much arrives in a short time then I am in for a stern talking to and possibly a Whack! Ouch! or three. The Moonage M5 SD puzzle was released for last years IPP in Houston, Texas and entered into the 2024 design competition where it won a prize in the top 10 vote getters section. Looking at the other winners, I can see that it was a VERY good year for puzzling that year. The available copies sold out fairly quickly when it was released for general sale in January - indeed they were all gone on the day of release. After the IPP success that should have been no surprise but I had run out of money at that time and had to pass.

Luckily Stephan knew that I was interested and when he had created a new batch fairly recently, I was offered a copy for a sum that made Mrs S glare at me. Luckily, she has been on a bit of a household stuff spending spree and couldn't really chastise me too much without drawing attention to her own profligacy. Maybe I should try to coincide my puzzle arrivals with her spending in the future?

I got a bit of a shock when I first saw it (someone actually brought it to the last MPP just before my copy arrived). I was expecting it to be beautiful and wasn't disappointed but I hadn't realised quite how big it would be. This Behemoth is 19cm tall, 7.5cm in diameter across the main body and 15cm across the tail fins. It weighs in at about 517g. When it came out of the box I was expecting she who must be feared to take one look at the size of it and land a hefty Whack! Ouch! on me but all she said was that it was very pretty. I haven't tried to put it on display yet but I am not sure whether it will actually fit on my shelves which may be a bit of a problem. I'm not allowed to display puzzles in the living room any more after she had the room decorated and she realised how nice the room looked without a large batch of puzzles on every surface. Sob!

Having found some time to start playing, I realised that there are a few parts that move a little bit but only a little. The Moonage M5 collar can be rotated if the button is pushed in first and the fins sort of wiggle. The purple heart launcher can be rotated a few degrees but that is it. Time for a little thought© and trying to combine what's possible. There are quite a lot of Aha! moments here and all of them lead beautifully from one to another. The important thing is the superb attention to detail from Stephan, when the original Apollo 11 rocket was launched to the moon, the power went in 3 phases. The first part was the jettisoned to release the second stage launcher and Stephan did the same here:

First stage release

Once the launcher has been jettisoned then it is possible to look inside and understand the mechanism properly - it's pretty clever and very precise. In achieving launch you have used 3 important elements - water, oxygen and energy and they are absolutely vital. My usual too and fro method here did cause me a little problem but not one that Houston would have suffered. I put some pieces back into place to try to get back to the beginning and suddenly found that I couldn't then remove one of them. Doh! Maybe I should pay attention to where the magnets were and not get mixed up. Luckily I had a pair of tweezers and with a bit of a struggle I managed to remove the errantly placed tool. I really am not terribly bright!

There are obviously other tools now needed and one is even visible but seemingly not reachable until I thought about what I had done before. After I had "thunk" again, I had my next tool and a place to use it and the second stage rocked was released leaving me with the passenger compartment in the nose cone:

Still not finished

The aim is to take the rocket to the moon and therefore I needed a lunar lander and maybe a bit more. After all, when they reached the moon, they got into their space suits and planted a flag on the surface of the moon. Releasing the next items was a fun odyssey. The mechanisms are varied and clever - every single step is beautiful with such attention to detail from the designer. I landed on the moon and took my photo which I have hidden behind a spoiler button. It really isn't a spoiler but if you don't want to see what the ultimate aim is then don't click it.

One small step for man!
Lunar lander, spaceman, US flag on the moon

That was a real fun challenge. Not too hard and only a couple of times when I had a small heart attack. Then it was time to reset the puzzle and, Houston, I had a problem! I had not paid full attention to how everything came apart and when I started to reassemble it I found that part of it wouldn't go together properly which was going to prevent the rest fitting. Aargh! Panic ensued and after a frantic opening and closing of parts that I had done it made me look very closely at the construction. I had missed noticing a critical part of the design and once I realised and a quick fiddle to get things correctly aligned, I was then able to put it all back together and admire the beauty of it all.

It wasn't cheap but, my goodness, it's beautiful and once I have found a place to put it, it will look beautiful on display. If you get a chance to play with one then enjoy. If you get a chance to buy a copy then jump at the chance, you won't regret it.

Weaving For Years!

Weaving from Aaron Wang

A very short post today - I have been working yet again this weekend and had very little time for puzzling and no Morbidity and Mortality meetings to ignore whilst playing with my toys! 🤣

Every year Aaron Wang produces a whole bunch of new disentanglement puzzles for sale from various genius designers. He sends out an email with his upcoming catalogue additions to his adoring customers and also posts the list on Facebook for people to choose from. This year he has a huge batch and I have already made my selection (don't tell Mrs S!) He only really produces puzzles of level 9 and higher and most are 10 or 10+ which means terrifyingly difficult. I have collected dozens (if not hundreds) of his creations over the years and there are 3 very large boxes of them in my garage with the ones that I have solved and 2 boxes in a wardrobe in the house of those I have so far failed to solve. Many of his puzzles involve string which means huge complexity and the ability to create tangled knotted catastrophes. More recently he has been using a lobster claw to allow emergency release of the catastrophe but there are a good few that don't have it and these frighten me to death! One of these is the Weaving puzzle signed by the incredible DDK and made in very very limited numbers by Aaron. In fact, as far as I know there may be only 2 or 3 copies in existence. I received one as a gift within my 2022 purchase.

Why did he not mass produce it? Some of the puzzles are so horrendous to make that he only makes a very small batch. That wasn't the reason this time. Aaron only made a few because he felt it was too simple a puzzle to put out on sale. OMG!

I have had this in one of my trays of puzzles to be solved for nearly 3 years and have picked it up many many times since I got it and have singularly failed and scared myself to death on a number of occasions. It consists of a single loop of string (not very long) and a ball to prevent the loop just being fed through all the oval metal rings. It is woven through a complex metal grill that looks rather like a radiator. The short length of the string should be reassuring BUT the lack of a lobster claw release mechanism is scary. I was also rather bamboozled by the way the string is woven through the centre of the grill completely but the outer wires were split on either side. On multiple occasions I tried various approaches to the disentanglement and began to get caught up in a knot or found myself running out of length. Despite the claimed "excessive simplicity" of the puzzle, I managed to completely fail for a very long time. I refused to put it away in my wardrobe and give up - if Aaron said it was easy, then there must be something to it that I should be able to find. I persevered...

During the meeting last week, having solved the packing puzzles first and feeling that I was on a roll, I picked up the Weaving puzzle yet again. As usual, I had no recollection of anything I had tried before and just started afresh. What if I do this??? Oooh! that's interesting. Suddenly, I was weaving away and not creating a knot. After 16 moves I had a rather nice interesting configuration and then another 18 moves I suddenly had 2 pieces of puzzle and a mystifies expression on my face. Why had it taken nearly 3 years? Aaron was right, it was a lot simpler than his usual level but, I have to say, no less delightful for that. 

Finally!
Now I need to put it back together again

Returning it to the start position did cause a little difficulty as I could not recall what I had done at the midpoint of the solve but I did manage it after an extra ½ hour of swearing under my breath! Yay! I can finally put another puzzle away in the wire puzzle collection box in the garage.

Thank you Aaron for yet another fabulous challenge - I am looking forward to my selection of puzzles from the new set. I am sure that I am not the only one but I think it would be good if you would consider making a few slightly simpler puzzles for sale. Not all of us are the disentanglement genius that you and your designing geniuses are.

---

Bucolic Cube

About 6 months ago I received some correspondence from a puzzler who suggested that I might want to have a look at the Bucolic cube. It was designed by Yasuhiro Hashimoto and entered into the 2013 IPP design competition in Narita, Japan where it won a "Top ten vote getters award". I had taken a note of this one to be either purchased or made in the future and this week managed to have a play.

What stimulated me to try it now when I had so little time to play? Well, Mrs S has decided that painting and decorating needs to be done in the house as it has been quite a long time since it was last done. Luckily for me, she does not want me to do the painting and decorating - she has another man who comes in to do it. My job is to go out and work my arse off to pay for the other man's services. During the process of clearing a couple of the rooms, I was handed my compartmented box with my fight cubes in them and was told that the box needed to be put away somewhere not cluttering the house. I had completely forgotten that I had them and this jogged my memory to go back and create the Bucolic cube and see what all the fuss was about.

The puzzle consists of 3 identical shapes to be assembled into a 3x3x3 shape - there will be 6 holes in the structure which should make it simpler but actually made it harder for me because I was not creating a complete face and they did not properly interlock. This meant that there were a lot more possible orientations of the pieces alongside each other. After a whole evening of playing with it, I came to the same conclusion as my corespondent and the IPP members that this puzzle was a good one - a very VERY good one.

It took me a good few hours!

If you don't have the Fight cubes then this should be easy to 3D print or you could buy it from PuzzleMaster here or from PuzzleGuy here. This is well worth getting your hands on - it is significantly more challenging than it looks.

It's Sublime, Then It's Ridiculous...

And Then Sublime Again!

Minima XIII beat me for soooo long

Last week I wrote in frustration about the final one in the numbered Minima series (number XIII or as Allard would make it - XXXXLIII). I have owned this one (from Frederic himself) for 4 years and a delightful portable plastic version from Tye (if you ask him nicely, he might make some more). I had failed and failed on this and eventually owned up to it as a catharsis on my little corner of t'internet.

Of course, as soon as I confess to the puzzling world about how useless I am at packing puzzles, disentanglement puzzles, boxes etc, I have one of those wonderful Aha! moments. This time was no different. The day after my confession, I was working from home chairing a meeting and then in the afternoon we had our departmental Morbidity and Mortality meeting was held on MS Teams (No I didnt have to confess to any mortality!)  I tuned in from the comfort of my conservatory with a pile o'puzzles next to me. My colleagues are now used to me playing with toys during these meetings and I get quite a few comments from people when I solve a particularly fearsome twisty during the meeting. For some reason, they think I'm some kind of genius and they are unaware of quite how bad my failure rate is. 

The pieces of Minima XXXXXXXXXCIII were in a pile waiting to be put away and I couldn't resist another period of self flagellation and set to work again. This time, after a few minutes of trying the same tricks over and over again, I looked at the slanted cut on the tetromino and wondered to my self:

"Self, what could you do with this odd cut?"

Suddenly a new idea hit my rather like the back of Mrs S' hand and I found a new and interesting possible movement that I hadn't thought to try before. It was too beautiful a move to be anything like chance - it had to be designed in. Suddenly, this made me look at the slanted cuts in the two triominoes, and again I was slapped on the back of the head - these pieces could be positioned in such a way that the fancy first move would slide by. Oh wow! What an incredible idea!

All that was left was to use the more conventional Minima type rotational moves to set everything up. It's a rather gorgeous sequence of moves to end up with all the pieces packed into the box and almost left me gasping with delight. 

Four years of puzzling!

The Minima 13 was the first of the series I received and was, I assume, the last of the series that Frederic designed. To my mind it is the very pinnacle of the Minima puzzle design - if you don't have a copy yet then try and find one to complete your collection (I assume that you have the rest of the set from Pelikan???) In the title of my post this is the "sublime".

The look of exultation on my face when I finally solved it during our departmental meeting did not go unnoticed! I saw a few colleagues grinning and got a couple of messages. It was time to carry on with some more of them.

Minima Nest by Lucie Pauwels

The Minima series from Frederic is really quite extensive now. Not only has Frederic expanded beyond the original 13, others have jumped on the bandwagon and seen the huge possibilities of "simply" packing a 2x2x3 box with smaller pieces that may or may not require rotations. Lucie Pauwels, is a very prolific designer who has appeared on these pages many many times. Lucie decided to try her hand at Minima design and here is one that I have had sitting waiting but not tried due to lack of time. It's the the Minima Nest which I purchased from Tye at the end of last year. It is also currently sold out but again, if you ask nicely, maybe more can be printed. Lucie took the standard 2x2x3 box and stood it on its end and then shifted each of the 3 layers a half voxel sideways. She then took some simple pieces and shifted several of them a half voxel across as well. 

Looking at the pieces, the puzzle doesn't look too awful - after all, 2 of them are simple 1 voxel cubes. The shifted pieces look perfectly designed to fit the staircase shape inside the box and it's easy to create a shape that should fit. Great, you would think, now just stuff them in. Except there's a problem Houston! Once a few pieces are nice and snug in the bottom two rows there are simple gaps to be filled and the only way to get the piece that should fit in is through a ½ voxel hole. That won't work! Try lifting up to make space but that's also not possible due to the overhang from the layer above. Time to think© and the first result of thinking is to place the single cubies into the bottom row and then build up from there. It goes swimmingly until you look at the top layer to be filled and come to the realisation that the staggered pieces can't be placed. Oh, it's delightful! More think©ing required which takes my mind off the meeting for a bit. Suddenly I have my 2nd Aha! moment for the afternoon and I've created a shape that should be removable and therefore it should be insertable. Time to try it - cue a punch in the air during a meeting - the picture does have a small spoiler in it so don't look unless you're certain you don't mind seeing a clue:

Solved it in a single afternoon! Maybe I'm getting better at puzzles?

That puzzle was ridiculous - so clever but not too hard. 

Finally we return to another sublime one - it's probably a bit ridiculous too!

Minima Twig by Frederic Boucher

Frederic hasn't finished with the Minima designs! This one was released around the time of the last IPP and produced again by Tye of NothingYetDesigns. It's also sold but there's no harm in you all sending him thousands and thousands of emails clamouring for a remake. It has also been sitting in my pile to be solved in the conservatory (yes, Mrs S is not really happy at how many piles I have dotted around the house). I still had another hour of meeting to go and therefore picked up a third challenge of the afternoon. The Minima Twig again consists of the standard 2x2x3 box but in this case there is just a single entry hole in one corner and each of the six faces has either a single drilled hole or a track the diameter of the hole. There are 6 domino pieces to be placed made from a choice of woods (I cannot remember what the one above is) and with a steel pin in the centre of a single voxel on each of the 6 pieces effectively making triominoes. There are 3 L shapes and 3 straight lines. Obviously each of the metal pins is intended to protrude from a hole drilled in the box. Rotations are allowed.

Placing the pieces in the box and posting the pin through the holes can restrict the movement of the pieces and cause blockages. This will require careful planning. I found that the requirement to pierce the holes made it much easier to work out possible assemblies and then in my head working out whether a disassembly would be possible was quite fun. There is a wonderful critical sequence to rotate pieces into the box that is required and within about 45 minutes I had my third puzzle of the afternoon solved. I  personally found that my afternoon Mortality and Morbidity meeting was a very productive time. Maybe I should ask the bosses to allow us to have more frequent meetings to get me out of the operating theatre so I can play with my toys.

Three in one afternoon!

Speaking of operating theatres, I am in one just now doing a trauma list - Trauma doesn't stop and weekends. I have written this in advance and set it to auto publish. Isn't the internet a wonderful thing? I hope that you all have had a wonderful puzzling weekend.