What Is The Right Level?

The latest  releases by Aaron Wang and friends

It's been a frustrating week. The surgeons I work with seem to be trying to kill me. They have lined up a whole bunch of absolutely gigantic operations on either enormously obese, incredibly frail and/or very elderly patients. It's not good for my nerves to do a bunch of revision hip replacements for infection followed by a 7 hour long total femur replacement on a 50kg anaemic 86 year old! Following a week like that it was time to write the on call rotas again yesterday. Needless to say I am knackered! As a result, my puzzle solving prowess has reached new lows. I'm rubbish at puzzles at the best of times but with a week like I have just had, I'm worse than usual!

So what do I do with a week like that? I attempt some of the most confusing puzzles I own. Not very bright! Every year at around IPP time, Aaron Wang and his friends in China, club together and release a new batch of disentanglement puzzles. Every year I buy a whole load of them and fail to solve most of them. This year I had hoped for a better result but I'm not entirely certain that will happen. The difference is that Aaron has listened to most of us and has produced a few puzzles that are lower than his usual level 10 difficulty. Also this year there were a bunch more that are made entirely of wire with less enormous lengths of string to get tangled up. I bought 10 - stupid boy.

Love Trick by Mr Wu

I started with a Level 7, Love Trick. It is designed by a new to me designer, Mr Wu and looks like a nice place to start.

Over the years I have solved many puzzles that have the basic double loop and rod pieces in various combinations (for example the Lantern puzzles. There is a nice move sequence to them that can be fun but also confusing if you have to do a lot of them at once.

Doing that well remembered move effectively moves the piece from one section to another and eventually a release occurs. The trick is to work out where the piece needs to be moved to sequentially. This one looks nice and easy because there are only a couple of places the piece can be moved to. I duly moved it from one segment to the next and realised that it's now in an odd and awkward to manipulate position. Maybe I should go back and try a different order? Eventually I realised that the order doesn't matter and I just had to be careful how I hold the puzzle to achieve what I need.

Hooray! I can solve something

This filled me with confidence and I had 2 puzzles to choose from. Aaron himself had designed a fun looking puzzle that was supposed to be level 7 but involved string. I shied away from it and decided to move up a level.

Black Hole by DDK

DDK is a very prolific designer and most of his puzzles are incredibly difficult. I was very gratified to see the Black Hole was a "mere" level 8. It looks almost easy with what I thought was an obvious exit point.

Again, the lack of string really appealed to me. I set to fiddling with it whilst watching TV and found a very nice move almost straight away. That move did change things and made the puzzle look like I needed to aim at a different area than I had first thought. OK let's try something...two pieces in my hands and a little yelp of surprise annoyed Mrs S. 

Gulp! What had I just done? Lesson for you all - DON'T solve complex puzzles whilst watching TV. I had absolutely no idea how the puzzle came apart and then could not reassemble the damed thing. Doh!

Two lovely pieces and no idea how I got them

I have spent several hours (my excuse is that work left me very mentally fatigued) and could not put it back together. Luckily, there is an easy reset method to this due to the size of one of the rings. I have reassembled it using the reset and tried to solve it again. Level 8 seems to be beyond me now - I can no longer take it apart. Is level 8 too difficult for me?

Bronze Tripod by DDK

Whilst trying to think© about the Black Hole, I moved up a level to 9 with the Bronze Tripod also by DDK. This had intrigued me as soon as I had seen it, there looked to be an N-ary component to it (there actually isn't) and it looked to confusingly have two possible exit points.

My quick fiddle when I first took my photos, showed me that there are a few possible starting moves for that shuttle but they quickly get blocked inside a loop with nowhere to go. I was reassure that a friend on FB showed that it was solvable and claimed that it was logical. 

I failed for several days to find the solution to this before I had my first breakthrough. I am not sure why I hadn't tried that particular sequence before but suddenly I had the shuttle in a new and interesting position which would allow me to focus on the other side of the puzzle. Again I got stuck before realising that I could perform an odd reflection move of the shuttle which allowed progression. I started on a new path and before I knew what I was doing, I had two pieces and only the vaguest idea how I had done it.

Oh dear! How had I done this?

There is no simple way to reset this so I was going to have to find the true pathway. The first two moves were pretty easy to remember but after that I was stuck and kept finding the two pieces separated in my hands. I managed to backtrack without even realising how. For some reason, I was unable to find the route that would allow me to transition between sides of the puzzle. I had to put it down for a while to calm my frazzled nerves and then tried again later. This time I actually had a think© and realised that I needed to consider some of the pieces as a group and manipulate them together and then separately. Suddenly I could see the whole solution in front of me and I was able to reset and then dismantle the puzzle with ease.

For a level 9, it is surprisingly just perfect for me. The right amount of thought and discovery intermingled with a frisson of panic at times. Finally, I am able to solve something the correct way.

So what is the right level? Level 7 might be a touch easy. Level 8 might be too hard. Level 9 is just right. Something is not right there but my feeble tired brain can't work out what. Now I really need to work on Black Hole again and see if I can actually understand a level 8 puzzle.

You really should get some of these puzzles from Aaron or from PuzzleMaster - pick carefully because they are not for beginners.

Burrs With A Twist

Literally... With Twisting Movements In Them!

Trust Steve to produce something funny with an extra twist in it!
Boarin' Burr - the boars appear on every surface

First of all, I MUST give proper attribution to the origin of last weeks main puzzle. The wonderful version of the Diagonal Star puzzle that I wrote about last week should actually be named the Sequential Cube. It was designed by the amazingly talented George Bell as a variant of Lee Krasnow's very rare Sequential Star. Practice does improve things with this puzzle - I can now solve the Sequential Star version and the 9 move version quite easily. The 14 move seems to be more problematic for me but I keep trying. If you get a chance to play then go for it - it's very mind-bending.

I should also point out that we have a new blog in the puzzlesphere - Fraser, whose name I forgot last week, has started an unassuming little place on the internet where he asks the useful question: Can an idiot solve it? This looks really useful to me - I have been an idiot my whole life (I'm pretty old now) and am rubbish at puzzles. I will be using his advice to see whether I should bother trying to solve some of the puzzles I see on the internet. Go show him some love/views! 

Today, I am writing about a couple of puzzles that look like burrs and sort of work like burrs in that they are composed of interlocking sticks but there is something twisted inside both figuratively and literally.

The IPP provides all of us with a list of puzzles we want. I am lucky enough to be given a few of them every now and then. Everything that the TwoBrassMonkeys do should be added to your list of things you want because there is always something special about them. Here, I have Steve Nichol's exchange puzzle. He designed a burr with some extra challenge to it. The theme is both the boars that are often found zooming around Italian towns causing havoc (Steve, cause havoc??? Oh yes! everywhere he goes) and of course, the name refers to the fact that pieces rotate like bores. and effectively double lock the burr sticks. Steve likes interlocking puzzles but always seems to want to make something a bit more interesting than a standard version. He has created them from hexagonal sticks and round sticks to confuse you. He's made odd movements and multi-step sequential discovery burrs which won my puzzle of the year for 2024. There seems to be no end to the ways that Steve wants to play with your head. In this case he has a burr with boars that got bored and bored their way inside your burr:

If you push on a boar then it unscrews from the puzzle!

This is interesting and very ingenious. It is quite reminiscent of Oskar's screw burr but extra confusing! Obviously this cannot be entered into Burrtools so you will need to be careful. Luckily everything is sequential and you quickly can produce a bunch of very odd looking sticks. Make sure that you mix them all up so that you have no idea what came from where and what orientation they were in when you started. This was one of my mistakes initially. It did not occur to me that stick orientation would be that critical when I scrambled them and I really struggle to reassemble it the first time.

There's nothing boring about this puzzle!
I have absolutely no idea how he designed this

The multi-coloured sticks can be assembled into a six piece burr in lots of ways but the locking mechanism comes from the bores/boars. Take a look at the notches in the sticks and with a little care it is possible to put it back together again with only a little trial and error as sticks may need switching end over end.

Great fun, with a twist - just as we would expect from Steve. Thanks mate. I assume that this will be put up for sale at some point. Keep an eye out on the Two Brass Monkeys website.

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SV Burr by Richard Williams (P91 puzzles)

This burr is a fascinating design by Richard Williams. The aim is to disassemble and reassemble the burr and, most importantly, in the process, understand why it has the name SV Burr - what is SV? I bought it at an MPP last September having watched lots of people struggle both with the disassembly but also get caught out by the reassembly. I made sure not to watch what they were doing and what they had found along the way. I took it home and began playing. Initially it has absolutely no moving parts and takes quite a bit of pushing and prodding to make your first move. Very quickly a tool is o=in your hands - not what you would usually think of as a tool - it's just a bolt. What can you do with a bolt in a burr?

There are a couple of holes in the puzzle where you can poke the bolt but no real clue as to whether this is having any effect. After poking and pushing and screwing and unscrewing I did find something and then movement happened. Yay! After that, nothing else was possible but I did have another hole. I "screwed" my courage to the sticking place and put the bolt in the hole and closed up the burr in the hope that I could now use gravity to pull or push something inside. Well, that was a stupid thing to do because now I couldn't move anything. After a day, I contacted Rich to see whether I was on the right track and apparently I had been very stupid! He had never even considered that anyone would be so stupid as to do that and advised me to try and undo what I had done. As always, never underestimate my stupidity! Eventually, I did manage to undo the mess that I had got myself into but it took a couple of days - phew! Then, of course, there was more stupidity! I tightened something to much and stripped some of the plastic off - this rendered my puzzle non-functional! Aargh! Yep, I'm an eejit!

At the next MPP, I had to give it back to Rich to fix. I eventually got it back at the last MPP and promised to be more careful with it this time. I started again determined not to prove myself too foolish. I did the first moves again and achieved my sliding burr moves. This time I did not lose a piece inside. I worked on various other possibilities and somehow managed to get more movement. I was screwing and unscrewing but not understanding why it changed things inside. Despite that, I managed to progress. At some point a new too dropped out and I had no idea where it came from. A little exploration revealed a hidden compartment which had been the hidey-hole. The new item was an odd looking tool but there was only one place it could go and in it went. In fact it went in and out several times causing some more screwing movements and another piece came off/out. Turning the puzzle over caused yet another tool to drop out and this time I had noted where from. After searching about there was only one place to try it and yes, more screwing about. Then the final piece was removable and the burr came fully apart:

A six piece burr?
Nope! A lot more than that.

After this it becomes clear what the SV stands for - I'm not going to give it away. You need to get your own copy of this and work it out for yourself. Thanks Rich!

So we have to burrs that have lots of twists in the tale and twists in the puzzling. Fabulous - I need to lie down now as I'm really quite dizzy.