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.