Sunday 17 March 2024

Amazing Value And Two Fabulous Resources For You

The CubeTwist Bandage Cube Set
Incredible value for money
Yes the 3x3 cube in the photo does look very easy - no stickers or tiles and all black. Even a 3 year old could solve that but above it in my nice little organiser is a complete set of tiles for it in all the usual colours. It includes tiles that are 1x2, 2x2, 2x2 and 2x3 cubies in size. The whole point is to make a bandaged cube of your choice.

I mentioned this puzzle many many years ago and feel that it is worth showing it off again because there is now something available for you all to help you with solving it and finding lots of challenges to be done with it. My friend Rline of the TwistyPuzzling YouTube channel fame has rebought this amazing set and has created a fabulous post on the Twistypuzzles forum where he annotates a method of describing the puzzles that can be created and also has produced an amazing spreadsheet that he has called CheckMakeSolve for allow you to visualise all the various puzzles that have been described so far as well as to make your own designs. The amount of work that has gone into this creation is incredible!

To go alongside this spreadsheet, Rline has been constructing and solving puzzles and posting videos on the approach to it. The whole point about Rline's approach is to use very simple methods to solve as many puzzles as possible. He showed off the "Ultimate solution" to the Rubik cube at the beginning of his YouTube career which uses just 2 or even 1 simple algorithm. The whole point of this sort of approach is not to memorise and fail to understand. The aim is to understand what simple things do and then use them creatively. I know all you non-twisty fans are shaking your heads and saying no, no, no! but it really is pretty straightforward for the basic twisty puzzles.

I had bought this set many years ago and played for a while but had been using the beginner's method for solving the Rubik cube at the time and found that this was rather hard with bandaged puzzles. I had set it aside and completely misplaced it. Now, with this new resource available I was determined to get back to it and bought the set again. Luckily it is a nice cheap puzzle and easily available (HKNowstore or Cubezz) - I bought it from Cubezz for a mere $11.99. How is that for value?

The cube above is the first one in the series that Rline is working through - it's the Block Built Cube. It's a very nice one to start with because the puzzle has 3 faces adjacent to each other that can easily be turned without becoming locked up. Having this set of faces available to move means that the top face pieces can easily be moved and rotated. Using the simple edge piece series once 3-cycles three edges but if you do it several times then you can use it to swap corners around and even rotate them. Remember, the edge piece series is nothing more than up, up, down, down. Using just a 4 move algorithm and using it creatively allows you to overcome a whole lot of bandaging. I was truly delighted when I was able to solve this challenge in just 20 minutes! I am a genius! Except, I'm probably not!

I have not had much puzzling time this last week and despite receiving some wonderful new challenges from Brian Menold (he sent me out a year of orders that he had kept aside for me until it was worthwhile paying the postage), I have not had time to play (I've not even had time to take photos!) I moved on to the second challenge, the Detour puzzle and my intelligence ran out (along with my luck). 

This one, as you can see, has only 2 faces that can be turned from this start position and even with the simple edge piece series system, it is hard to make this usable. I spent a whole week, on and off, trying to think of a way to solve it. In fact, it was even almost impossible to scramble the bloody thing! At the end of that week, I realised that it is possible to turn the blue and yellow faces 180º 3 times each which flips the pieces enough to free up a third face. From this position we are back to the same approach as before but just using it creatively. This was an amazing AHA! moment and having spent a week looking at it and failing to find anything useful, it then took me only another 20-30 minutes to solve it.

Just using basic techniques creatively is an amazing thing to be able to do and the sense of achievement is fabulous. If you can master a 3x3 Rubik cube and use the Ultimate technique and be able to think© a bit then this set will provide hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of fun and frustration. With the amazing resource from Rline (it has taken him hundreds of hours to create the spreadsheet and the ever increasing series of videos), this is a MUST HAVE puzzle set. If you truly get stuck then the video for the one you are stuck on is there to help and once you have understood one then maybe the next will be easier. Don't be afraid, just DO IT!



MatchBox Playground Resource

MatchBox Playground from Pelikan in collaboration with Péter Gál
I had written about this wonderful (actually incredible) puzzle set from Jakub and Jaroslav back in February and they sold out within minutes. Luckily a whole new batch will be produced soon and those who managed to pre-order will get their hands on them and have a whole lot of wonderful challenges.

I have been chatting with Péter about this amazing creation and the work he has done for it. He offered me the full set of BT files for the puzzling community to look at and play with. It has every single puzzle that his analysis created and is a fascinating thing to peruse. I have uploaded the whole lot as a resource to my Google drive and it can be downloaded as a single zip file here. The individual xmpuzzle files are gzipped inside the main file but this should not cause a difficulty for you. 

Thank you to Péter for this - I hope that you find it as fascinating as I do.




Sunday 10 March 2024

Oleg’s Orb/Ball Is Smaller Than Expected!

Oleg's Wardrobe from DEDwood Crafts
A few months ago Dee Dixon notified the world of the next puzzle in his never ending series of sequential discovery puzzles and I duly placed the release date in my task manager app with a reminder to go online on the dot of the release time and be ready with my credit card. I was very lucky to be quick enough and complete my purchase because all 65 copies went in under 5 minutes! My goodness the market for these has gone through the roof. Luckily for all of you who missed out, there will be another batch of 50 being released within a few weeks. Believe me, it is worth it!

It took a little while for the rather enormous box to cross the pond and the unboxing was well worth the wait. This puzzle is simply gorgeous! It genuinely looks like a wardrobe that would be present in a medieval castle complete with a beautifully carved door handle. It is 5"x7"x3.5" and made from Peruvian walnut and African striped mahogany (I think the handle might be Ebony). The door of the wardrobe has been textured to add to the authenticity and the quality feel of the puzzle. It is accompanied by a rather large card explaining the rules and the rather endearing story written by Brent Hessel to explain why we have a wardrobe and are looking for the Orb of Prosperity. Apparently King Oleg stole it from the villagers and hid it in his wardrobe. The plucky Knight Note has stolen the wardrobe from Oleg but cannot find the Orb and has asked for help from this plucky puzzler!

It is all absolutely beautifully presented (the cards are really difficult to photograph!). The first thing I noticed after my initial admiration of the craftsmanship (Dee always makes such gorgeous puzzles) was the fact that on the left side of the wardrobe there was a small area cut out that could be rotated in place to reveal a slot for something. I obeyed the rules and did not spinning of the puzzle but have to admit that I did shake it a bit upside down to see if I could make anything come out of the slot. Of course neither Dee not Oleg would make it so simple. There is also a small area on the base of the wardrobe that acts as a button but barely moves at this point.

There's nothing else for it...time to open the wardrobe. What do you do with a wardrobe? Pull the handle of course and Aha! the door opens (in fact it comes off) much to my surprise. Inside there is a warning and four drawers:

It's all so gorgeous!
There are no handles on the drawers so I tipped them out - luckily it's only a small wardrobe! They all come out and there is nothing in those drawers. What next? Time to think©!

The craftsmanship is wonderful
Dee's mark
With the drawers out it is possible to see that the wardrobe has been constructed in layers and one is slightly wiggly. This might be useful but at the moment for me, did nothing. I have to sheepishly admit that I got stuck at this point for over a week! Whilst investigating this I suddenly found a tool had appeared and I had absolutely no idea where from. Odd! I used a torch and looked inside and there was no clue where it came from and only 2 days later did I work it out. As I have said before, "I am really not terribly bright". Having found the tool, I had to work out what to do with it. The little slot that I had mentioned before seemed an obvious choice and with huge expectations I slotted it into place and...NADA! It wouldn't fit. Bugger! Maybe I was doing it wrong? I tried to do the same move on multiple occasions and in different orientations of both me and the puzzle. And...still NADA! Think© dammit!

I thunk for a while and noticed something else where the tool might be helpful so tried that and...NADA! I am really not very good at puzzling - it's amazing that anyone reads what I write. I then had to put this one down for a while or there would be no blog posts for you. I went back and forth from Brass Monkey 6 to the twisty puzzle to the Wardrobe for a while and only made progress on the two former puzzles. I must be missing something in this. I was convinced that the wiggly bit must be the secret but it wasn't doing anything in any position and so I was tempted to try something that was not in the rules - my last resort after blowing on a puzzle is to submerge it in gin to see whether that might help. With the size of this bloody thing, I would need to use a whole bottle and Mrs S was not going to let me do that. I did also suspect that gin might not be good for the wood - I know that I am thick but really not that dumb. Eventually, after 2 weeks, I made a very small but very interesting discovery - I had another tool which made what was wiggly really quite mobile. Man, that is a very unusual move in a puzzle! I had lots more movement and a lovely locking mechanism that I could not see but worked every time. This allowed me to try something else which did nothing until I tried it differently and it did. Bang! I had another tool which I did not know how I managed to unlock or even where it had come from.

This new tool looked very useful. It fit somewhere and then fell out again. Maybe I could try....

Aha!

That is very interesting. I could make the took disappear inside. At this point there were only so many possibilities and before long I heard a click. I couldn't see anything new as a result of the click so carried on fiddling when Oleg's orb fell on the table. A word of warning - if you are doing SD puzzles, always do them on a table or on a lap tray. Son't do them on an armchair and especially not with a cat on your lap because stuff disappears quickly inside the crevices of an armchair or in the gaping maw of a peeved cat!

I appeared to have retrieved the Orb and I have to say that King Oleg has a very small ball!

The Orb of Prosperity is a little erm underwhelming
Having found the Orb, I am told that all is well in the village and I can now reset the puzzle back to the beginning without fear of the consequences. Except after over a week of trying, I cannot seem to reset the puzzle. I am trying to do the reverse of what I had done but something is not working for me. I suspect that I have forgotten a specific orientation for the puzzle when I do a certain move or sequence and need to keep experimenting to get it to work. The result of this? Note to myself to always pay attention to what moves you do and what position they are in when you do them.

I'll keep at it. It will look fabulous on display with all my other Dedwood Crafts puzzles. I really must get back to the Burner and Uplift puzzles which I have also singularly failed:

Uplift
Burner
I also think there is another new one coming out which I will hopefully be quick enough on the draw to purchase! If all the previous ones are anything to go by then it will be superb.
Keep an eye out for the second batch if you didn't manage to get one of these from the first.


Sunday 3 March 2024

Celebrating a Landmark With a Best of Year?

Brass Monkey Sixential Discovery Puzzle (aka BM6)

AT LAST!

I have absolutely adored the Brass Monkey burr series (which are not burrs) - I have reviewed them (along with a whole bunch of their other releases) over the last few years and some have been awkward to solve whilst others have made me laugh out loud as I did silly things to solve them. This one, the last in the series, made me frustrated, made me laugh and made me gasp in disbelief. It has taken me weeks and weeks to solve! 

I am delighted to be able to show this one off on the same week that my pageview count topped the 3 million mark! I find it totally unbelievable that anyone spends the time to read the rubbish that I write. It even continued and got more popular after my mother died (so it couldn't have all been down to her). Thank you for coming along for the ride and allowing me to justify my "little" hobby to the present wife!

Main site
New additions site
Total page views now 3,017,111 - thank you so much!

If you buy this then you probably should own the set - they are all fun to solve and look great on display:

Six wonderful challenges
They all look the same as six piece burrs with only the markings on the ends of the pieces showing a difference between them. Each of the previous versions have had a significant nod to different puzzle genres and this last one is the most enjoyed puzzle type of all the sequential discovery puzzle. If that is your thing then this is the amongst the best SD puzzles I have ever tried. Go BUY IT!

I was lucky enough to get one of the first of them to be released and set to straight away. The first thing I realised was that nothing moves...nothing at all! I poked and prodded and peered inside the holes that were in the ends of some of the burrsticks. I used a torch and all this told me was that I couldn't see inside. I pushed and pulled and wiggled and found absolutely nothing. Yep! Not terribly bright as always.

I then noticed some movement with something and, as this was the only thing I had found in a day or so, I persistently wiggled and poked it. Suddenly it wiggled more! Hooray! I carried on doing the only thing that worked and after about an hour something came loose. I had found something special! But this just proved that I was an eejit! I should have realised that this wasn't right because Steve and Ali would never have a puzzle that solved that way. Having found something which did not give me any tools, I then inverted what I found and pushed it back only to have it go in and then go rigidly solid and not come out again! Oooh! that's not good, is it? Time to contact Steve over the interwebs and sheepishly admit what I had done and ask whether it might be irreversible. I was reassured that what I had done was not irreversible but I should not have been able to do it in the first place - I dare say that Steve sheepishly admitted that something hadn't been tightened adequately. He would make sure that all the others did not have this move possible.

So I had found a thing, returned the thing and jammed that bit in so that I could no longer retrieve the thing. I hope that you all find that description helpful enough to avoid doing the same "thing"? I guessed that after having my hopes and dreams dashed like that, I should return to solving. My problem? I had pushed and pulled and poked and prodded everything I could think of. Apart from a slight general wiggle caused by the interlocking burr pieces not being too tight, I could find nothing. This state of affairs persisted for weeks! Every day I would risk sanity, kitchen tiles and worktop playing with my very heavy metal paperweight. I kept getting looks of impending violence from Mrs S when she thought I might drop it and crack something. After about 3 weeks, whilst chatting with the genius (yes, Derek Bosch strikes again) he suggested that instead of pushing and pulling and prodding, I should actually look at the bloody thing! Now, why didn't I think of that? The next day, I sat down with it and a nice bright light and properly examined the whole puzzle - if I was a good puzzler, then I would probably have thought of that already. After about 15 minutes, I noticed a detail that I had not seen before - what if I??? OMG! Aha!

I suddenly had a "thing" and from here on progress was a lovely sequence which started with:

  1. I have this - what can I do with it?
  2. I tried that and it didn't work so maybe I could try this?
  3. Aha!
  4. I have another thing
  5. Back to step 1
This 5 step sequence happened over and over and over again. Almost every time there was a new item. I have never seen a puzzle with so many pieces and so many steps. It was totally logical and required a nice bit of think©ing to manage each step. One or two of the tools needed to be used more than once but  mostly there was a new tool for each step. I was having a ball! After 6 or 7 steps, I stopped returning back to the beginning each time I stopped playing because there were just too many pieces and steps to keep reversing.

After another few of evenings of play, I managed to retrieve the part that I had mistakenly freed and then re-trapped in my first attempts. I had a monkey!

I thought that this was it - I'm an eejit!
This was the place I had been at last weekend when I went to write about the puzzle. I did have a sort of nagging feeling that there were pieces that I had not yet explored but I suppressed those doubts and when I sat down to start writing, I looked at Allard's wonderful review and saw his solved picture and also reread the announcement page on the TwoBrassMonkey site. Oh NO!!! I had not completed the puzzle - the ultimate aim was to find the bananas and feed them to the monkey. This seems to be a theme for Steve and Ali. There was obviously at least one more step and I had no idea what to do next.

I could see that there was something inside that deserved attention but I did not have a tool that would fit. Yet again it was time to think© and it hurt. I spent another 5 days looking for the right tool and moves only to not find anything. I then had to look at what I had and realised that there was something that was peculiar about one of the pieces I had. A sneaky idea occurred and I said aloud "what if I do this? Much to the disgust of she who who is thinking violent thoughts about big Steve and Ali (run guys, run!) my thinking aloud led to an Aha! shout! which really upset her. I then had yet another thing to explore and finally after 35 separate puzzling steps (give or take a few) I had my puzzle solved!

The BM6 dismantled and I have bananas for the monkey
No spoilers here
There are a serious number of pieces here! I have never seen anything like it in the 14 years I have been puzzling. It is incredible that the boys managed to fit so many parts and so many steps into one epic puzzle. Not only is this likely to be the best puzzle of the year - you have another 10 months until my 2024 top ten(ish) but this may well be the best puzzle I have ever solved! It is right up there with the Angel box, Opening bat, Katie Koala and Mittan puzzles.

Of course, having dismantled it and spread all the pieces out for photos, it was time to put it all back together. I had enough memory of the steps to not find this too hard but the big challenge was how to place the burr sticks so they could assemble into a six piece burr again. I am not good at burr assembly and this took me a little while to work out.

This puzzle is just plain epic! Don't hesitate - just buy it. I am sure that you will find the first step much quicker than me and not need a genius to help you. But once you have found that first step there is a marvellous journey ahead of you.

Thank you guys! I very much doubt that you can ever top this but I am waiting with bated breath to see.


Sunday 25 February 2024

An Icosahedral Puzzle for You Because I’m an Eejit!

Icosaminx with my own colour scheme
Don't they look great?
This is a fabulous puzzle - both in looks and in solving but I am writing about it with a heavy heart...I had not actually intended to write about it this weekend. I have to admit (yet again) that I'm not terribly bright! I have spent weeks on my solving odyssey of the Brass Monkey Sixential Discovery puzzle and really thought that I had it beaten (it took me 3 weeks to find the first step!) and whilst uploading my photos and looking at what I had done and the pieces I had found (OMG there are so many pieces!), I had this sneaky suspicion that I was missing something. I checked Allard's review and realised that I am truly a rubbish puzzler - not only had I taken an obscenely long time to get to where I was but I also had convinced myself that I had reached the end when I really had not and in retrospect it was obvious! Aargh!

As a result of this, I am having to discuss the Icosaminx which looks fearsome but is a minor challenge compared with the recently purchased sequential discovery puzzles that I am failing at. 

Most puzzlers seem to be geometry freaks (another reason that we are "not normal") and with a large number of tetrahedral, triangular prism, cubic, cuboidal, pentagonal prism, hexagonal and dodecahedral puzzles there is always room for something with another wonderful shape and yet more sides/vertices. Enter the Icosaminx...who can resist a 20-sided puzzle? Not me! I had to buy it as soon as I saw it on sale. 

As you can see, it's a corner turning puzzle which means that it is EASY to solve despite it's looks:

Corner turning makes for an easy puzzle
The effect of being corner turning means that the only parts that scramble are the face centers and the edges in triads. My usual approach to any twisty puzzle is to explore simple move sequences first and undo them and look at the effects to see how they can be used. Often I scramble by accident but within 5 minutes of performing an up, up, down, down I could see that those triads were being moved around like any edge piece series would. This is useful as the edges would be easy to place but what about the centres? Remembering the easy approach to commutators that I have learned many times I could see that with so many vertices, it would be easy to turn one and move a single center out of the triad and undo the up, up, down down which would make for a nice easy 3-cycle of the centres. 

Even this can be built partially by intuition

Hooray! within just 5 minutes of playing with the puzzle I had a beautiful solution approach. I would orient the corners, build up most of the bottom half of the puzzle by intuition and block building (this is easy because there is so much space on a 20 faced puzzle - I even was able to do this on the incredible Eitan's Star from many years ago.

Once half of it is built by intuition, I can then 3 cycle to place the edges and finally use my 10 move commutator with a few easy setup moves to rotate all the centres into place. I figured that taking 5 minutes to work out how to solve a twisty puzzle was pretty brilliant of me and then I failed the Brass monkey 6! Sob!

Time for a scramble:

It looks great scrambled and much harder than it actually is
Having admired the apparent chaos of so many pieces, I set to and am gratified to tell you that it really was as easy as I have told you. It's a bit laborious with so many pieces to place but a remarkably satisfying puzzle to solve. It took about 15 minutes to complete and left me with a big grin. I have taken it to work to show off and yet further convince my colleagues that I am a genius. They look at the puzzle with horror and then amazement when it is solved so quickly. At least some people think I am a genius whereas the puzzling world, my poor readers, well know the truth of my meagre skills.



As a follow up to last week's blog post, I can tell you that the puzzles I reviewed from Pelikan went on sale and as expected the really fancy ones sold out very quickly. I have been told that Jakub and Jaroslav intend to make more copies of the MRI and Matchbox Playground (and maybe the Filling V) in the future. Keep an eye out for them.

I did manage to finally solve the MRI with a very big smile on my face. I had completely missed something in the week that I had it and when I found it laughed at the simplicity and beautiful implementation of the mechanism:

It took me over a week!


Sunday 18 February 2024

Truly Something to Behold

Soon to be released by Pelikan
At  the beginning of the week before last I took delivery of a VERY large box from Jakub and Jaroslav containing 7 puzzles and a request to have reviews as quickly as possible. I am just human and with my simple brain cannot possibly solve all of these in that short time (especially when you realise that there are hundreds of challenges here and some are really very difficult indeed.

Here we have:
Back row:
    Matchbox Playground - an extension of Oskar's original design by Péter Gál
Middle row:
    Filling V by Dr Volker Latussek
    Flummox by Benjamin Heidt
    Appletree by Benjamin Heidt
Front Row:
    Parallel Burr Cube #2 by Osanori Yamamoto
    Rattle Twist Duo by Osanori Yamamoto
    MRI by Benjamin Heidt

My picture does not do justice to the beauty and quality of them all (for that, you should wait for the official photos from Ivan Danik which appear on the Pelikan site.

Pelikan 2024 Feb

Stunning series this time with what looks like one of the most gorgeous puzzle sets I’ve ever seen.

Filling V 

Fillin V by Volker Latussek
Sent with just the triomino left out

Dr Latussek returns to challenge us with another of his wonderful packing puzzles that look much easier than they actually are. This one made of ????? comprises 6 L tetrominoes plus an L Triomino giving us the required 27 voxels to make up a solid cube. I could instantly see that there were several ways to make the cube and each of these could be attempted in several orientations with respect to the box. This box has a nice large slotted entry hole which looks like it shouldn’t be much of a hindrance to inserting the pieces. Dr Latussek said this:

"While working on the FLOP series, I had some fun working with completely filled boxes. I ‘d already done some preliminary work using L-shaped tetracubes, so it made sense to me to work on Lazlo Molnar and Alexander Magyarics’ six Ls puzzles and to combine them with the V-shaped tricube to make one of the 65 possible cubes and then put them in a box with only one opening. Of course, I started with my usual CASINO box, only to learn that this recipe doesn’t produce a sufficiently challenging puzzle, and neither does a FLOP box. Actually, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. Given the filling of a cube-shaped box, the actual design task was to find the correct, single, continuous opening.

Despite the numerous specifications, FILLING V is a challenging puzzle whose solution still surprises me. But there will never be a FILLING I."

Having found several possible cubes, I quickly noticed that many could be discarded because of the requirement to place an L shape (or even more than one) in at the end as a last piece. This cut down the options considerably and then left me with the need to place 5 pieces in the box. Here lies the challenge for this puzzle. There seems to be plenty of space to place 5 pieces but with lots of wiggle room and all you can do is wiggle and I needed quite a bit more space than that. At this point it’s a request to think© and notice what the box does allow you to do. There is a really lovely Aha! moment here and suddenly the wiggle room becomes room to really do something. Burrtools told me that there are 65 possible ways to assemble the pieces into a 3x3x3 cube but I found something pleasing quite early on.

I placed my last piece in the box with a huge grin on my face! This is, on the face of it, a much simpler puzzle than the Flop series but I think is better for it. The best description is “elegant” - it’s almost as elegant as the classic Casino which won so many accolades.

It’s an essential purchase!

Flummox

Flummox by Benjamin Heidt
This beautiful and rather diminutive creation was designed by a new name on the scene, Benjamin Heidt. If this is a typical example of puzzles from him then I hope that Jakub and Jaroslav make more. It is a fabulous variant on the classic 6 piece burr with length of 6 voxels (pieces made from a vibrant Purpleheart). The addition of little additional pieces (made from Maple) added onto the sides of the burr sticks which interfere with the the usual movement of the pieces and make the solution much more interesting.

The solution level is: 13.4.2.3 which is just right for all but the most masochistic of burr solvers and is delightful to explore. From the start position there are 4 or 5 possible moves and then further exploration after some of them. This took me about an hour to solve using my usual to and fro method which also meant that I could reassemble it from memory. The really good solvers will disassemble it relatively quickly and then have a really nice challenge assembling from scratch.

Beautifully made pieces

Appletree

Appletree by Benjamin Heidt
Here we have another very interesting design by Benjamin Heidt. It is a beautifully burr made in the shape of an Apple tree complete with apples amongst the foliage. It has been stunningly created using American Walnut, Acacia with Padauk apples.

This takes a bit of fiddling and exploration in every direction to find the first piece to move and after this, if you’re anything like me, it’s followed by an “Oh my God!!!” moment as all of a sudden a whole LOT of pieces move in various directions. Slight panic ensued and I quickly decided to return to the beginning and discovered that it wouldn’t go - aaargh! It took a frantic few minutes to sort of scrunch it back together and breathe a sigh of relief. I had to gird myself before trying again. This is fun! For me it’s a puzzle version of a rollercoaster.

Having done that several times and worked out how it locked and unlocked, I proceeded to explore and quickly found that several pieces were removable. I kept them in a place where I could tell the position and orientation. After removing 4 or 5 the trunk fell off and it sort of scrunched up again. I was lost! Despite this, the puzzle remained pretty stable even if everything was jiggly. I actually struggled to remove the remaining pieces, they did not just fall apart. Over the next 20 minutes I gradually disassembled it piece by piece and, oh boy, there are a lot of pieces.

Appletree pieces
After all of that, I had not even done the main challenge! This is not a stunningly designed sequential disassembly puzzle as I alluded to above…it is actually an assembly puzzle - the tree, as received, is in a "transport configuration" - the actual aim of the puzzle is to assemble the tree again but with 4 red apples on each side of the tree. There is no way that I was going to reassemble the transport solution without assistance let alone the main challenge and so I am off to Burrtools for a happy time sketching pieces out. Great fun!

Rattle Twist Duo

Rattle Twist Duo by Osanori Yamamoto
My friend's version
This beautiful interlocking puzzle designed by Osanori Yamamoto is made from Maple (pieces) with 2 different frames: one Jatoba and the other Zebrano. This one was so good that it was made for me by my greatly missed friend and mentor Tsy Hung Chein (aka Felix). Felix had one of the best eyes for a fabulous puzzle and if he took the time to make a copy and send it to me then you can be assured that there is something special about it. I had absolutely adored the copy sent to me - and I am delighted that many others will now get to experience a puzzle that looks simple but has significant challenge to it. 

Osanori-san’s documentation that he sent to Jakub said that the 2 interlocking pieces should be sent out locked on one frame with the aim being to remove them and place them on the other and then return it to the start position. Like many of his creations, rotations are both possible and required. For a puzzle with only 2 pieces to be fitted on a relatively simple frame, this should not be so difficult. Despite having done it before, it took me a good hour to disassemble one and assemble the other. 

Then going back the other way after a delay to allow forgetting was just as much of a challenge.

Parallel Burr Cube #2 

Parallel Burr Cube #2 by Osanori Yamamoto
Another challenge by Osanori-san, this consists of a Frame made from Bubinga and a set of 6 board burr pieces made from Limba. It is strikingly beautiful. Initially I thought that this was just a framed 6 board burr but it’s not quite this. The boards are held apart from each other by the frame making sure they interact loosely with each other being trapped by just the end-plates of each board. At the beginning there are several possible moves but the paths are mostly dead-ended after just 1 or 2 moves. This means no huge long fruitless pathways to explore. It requires a search for something that goes somewhere and for me, took quite a while to find the required move that opened up the puzzle for further exploration. The first piece can be removed quite quickly after just 6 moves which then allows you to peek inside and gain some more understanding of the interaction of the pieces. Having removed the first piece, it does not seem to get any simpler and the puzzle transforms into almost a disentanglement puzzle - it is like unravelling a knot inside a box whilst you can only see a small section of the knot at a time. It is at times frustrating, sometimes fiddly as the boards can catch on the edges as there is a little wiggle room, but is always an enjoyable exploration. The move count is not particularly high but it is still fun to explore and work out at each stage how to make room for the next piece to slide.

You can see how the pieces are locked in place
Having dismantled the puzzle over about an hour or more, I had kept the pieces in order of their removal and remembered which position they had come from. All with the aim of facilitating reassembly without resorting to Burrtools. I was feeling quite proud of myself as I inserted the first three and then for some reason the fourth one just couldn’t be inserted. What was I doing wrong? A careful look at the shapes of the pieces revealed that the second piece had been inserted upside down followed by the third correctly and this couldn’t leave room to insert the next. OK, having realised this, take it apart again…except I couldn’t dismantle it! Aargh! Minor panic ensues and I have to work out all over again how to undo the interior disentanglement puzzle I had created for myself. After a frantic 10 minutes, I had all the pieces and admonished myself for being an eeejit and not keeping track of piece orientation as well as order. After this it went back together nice and smoothly. This puzzle is wonderful - it looks great, is sort of a burr and disentanglement puzzle at the same time and, if you are good enough, it can be a really tough assembly puzzle as well.

MRI

MRI by Benjamin Heidt
This new rather quirky and very attractive puzzle design by Benjamin Heidt is a new type of puzzle for Pelikan and I am not certain how to categorise it. Apparently Benjamin is a technician who works on MRI machines in hospitals. He must be very used to working with magnets and there are several of them inside this puzzle. It looks just like an MRI scanner complete with a patient (he has hair and a nose!) on the scanning platform inside the magnet. The aim is to remove the patient from the scanner by unlocking the hidden interior mechanism. One thing Benjamin should know is that you must NEVER bring another ferrous metal object inside the Faraday cage walls of an MRI room because it will turn into a missile if released in the room (believe me, I have seen it with an old Molybdenum steel oxygen cylinder - it moves very fast and does a LOT of damage!) but here he has disobeyed all the rules. The puzzle has a magnetic ball bearing on the floor held by a magnet embedded inside it and obviously this magnetic bearing is used to somehow unlock the patient from the scanner and remove him. 

I do not know how many steps is required because I have so far not managed to do much more than make interesting clicking noises as I move the bearing over the surface. I am making things happen inside but so far I have made no progress with the release - my patient may well starve to death in the MRI! I may be reduced to having to take it to work and asking a kind radiographer to take an Xray of it for me.

This is certainly something interesting which we have never seen before from the Pelikan workshop. Well worth adding to your collection for the quirkiness and the considerable puzzling challenge.

Matchbox Playground

Matchbox Playground - an extension of Oskar's idea by Péter Gál
This rather large puzzle set must be one of the most beautiful puzzle sets that I have ever seen! It is simply stunning and an amazing scope of work by the designer and by the craftsmen. It is the result of an epic amount of work by the incredible puzzle designer, Péter Gál.

The box opens like a matchbox
There are puzzle sheets and an explainer inside
Cubic dissection version
I have quite a few burr sets and this one ranks up there alongside the very best of them and will take pride of place in my collection. It is not a burr set but a set of increasingly difficult assembly puzzles based on the wonderful and clever Oskar’s Matchboxes puzzle that has been produced by several craftsmen over the years as well as 3D printed. Oskar's original puzzle had 5 pieces and I found that one pretty challenging. Later the idea was extended by Alexander Kapkan with 6 pieces and again by Onno Hein with 6 pieces in a different configuration. Over more than a year Péter had performed an exhaustive computational analysis. A smaller version of this had been released in the IPP design competition in 2016. Péter's analysis was restricted to a 3x2x1 matchbox with the matches attached at the gridlines giving 14 possible match/matchbox pairs. This puzzle set is contained in a gorgeous box shaped and sliding open like a matchbox itself to reveal the full set of 14 possible pieces and an envelope with an explanation and puzzle challenges ranging from using just 4 pieces up to the maximum of 13. 

Just look at the presentation here - it is amazing!
There are effectively hundreds of challenges here as each one has multiple solutions to find. The individual boxes are stunningly made out of Maple, Wenge and Jatoba and the case made from Maple, Wenge and Oak.

This picture will be essential if I am going to put them back!
When I took a few out to admire them, I realised straight away that I would need a photo of how they were arranged in the box! If you do just tip them out then an additional challenge for you will be to pack them back in again - I was not brave enough to do that! The challenges are really fun to do and require considerable thought. The cards show just the required pieces and not the eventual shape that you need to use. This means that simple entry into Burrtools is not possible. I have managed the first couple of challenges and really look forward to spending real time with this set. This is absolutely fabulous! I have put 3 of my solutions to the first challenge behind a spoiler button - if you plan to buy the set then don't look at it:


Should you buy this set? Hell yes! It's stunningly gorgeous, a whole lot of puzzling challenges. I absolutely love puzzles that come with a booklet of challenges e.g. the Peanut puzzle, the cubic Mazeburr, Rhombic Mazeburr and Split Mazeburr and this new one from Pelikan is just amazing!