String Or Wire? Or Both?

Should They Go On Display?

 

Concertina Wire by DDK made by Mr Gao - bought from Aaron Wang

A wonderful gift from Dale

Due to having a horrendously busy week with operations that went on and on (and on) beyond the normal working day, I haven't had much time to play. It was Mrs S' birthday on Friday and I felt that puzzling probably ought to take a second place that day. As a result. this article is a real short one and more philosophical than many of my posts.

At the MPP last weekend, I had a really nice chat with Dale (who gave me a copy of one of his old exchange puzzles from IPP 25 in 2005). Dale is one of the few puzzlers I personally know (apart from Dick Hess) who really appreciates disentanglement puzzles. Over the years od attending the MPPs I have worked many times on these fabulous challenges with him as we both seem to get stuck on the same types of thing. 

Lots of puzzlers seem to be attracted to the simple (and occasionally not so simple) interlocked nail puzzles but very few seem to really collect or solve the more complex wire puzzles and even fewer of the group love the puzzles that include string in them. Dale and I discussed why that might be as well as whether they should be displayed or even look good on display.

Whilst we worked together on a puzzle that he had been stuck on (it was a wood and string version of the classic ball and chain puzzle made with extremely tight tolerances), I had to admit that I did not display any of my disentanglement puzzles at all. It is difficult to be sure but I think I must have about 400-500 disentanglement puzzles and almost all of them are stored in Ikea storage baskets. The ones that I have solved are kept in the garage (I have a catalogue reminding me which ones are in which box) and a whole bunch of unsolved ones are in a wardrobe in the house. Only the one at the top of the post is currently on display and that is not because of the look... even though it is quite attractive, it is only on display because I am still working on it. I have been trying to solve this masterpiece by DDK and made by Mr Gao which was sold to me as part of the 2025 releases by Aaron Wang.

I don't find the diagrams help me much!

Dale and I were interested in finding out why so few puzzlers are really into disentanglement puzzles and those that are tend to be less appreciative of the ones involving string. I don't think we were able to come to any real conclusions. I personally have been moving away from the puzzles that involve string (unless they are Chinese ring variants) because I find many of them impossibly difficult to solve and in many of them the solving process can end in a dead puzzle with an irrevocably knotted string. I have been very grateful that Aaron's string puzzles for the last 3 or 4 years have included a quick reset mechanism. This is particularly useful when a knot occurs but also with the Chinese ring type puzzles, the sequence of moves is often so very complex that it is a frequent occurrence for a puzzler to lose concentration and either end up right back at the beginning without realising it or caught in a dead end and due to the huge number of moves to get there, it is often better to use the quick release and return to a known correct earlier position than to backtrack and get lost.

Circuit board I (also by DDK and made by Mr Gao)

Many of the non-Chinese ring type puzzles that have been produced over the last 5 or 10 years look fantastic (which is why I couldn't resist buying them) but require some incredible brain power to work out a solution. The Circuit board I above has a really short loop of string which would make you think it shouldn't be that difficult to wind it off the wire grid. However, I have been playing with this for a year as well and can honestly say that I am no closer to the solution now than when I first started. Indeed, Aaron did rate its difficulty as 10+ but I think only the very best of disentanglement enthusiasts will be able to work this one out. I consider myself to be above average on this wire puzzles but the sheer complexity of these is making me more and more hesitant to buy more string based challenges. 

I haven't completely given up on the Concertina wire puzzle yet because it is still attractive enough to leave on my puzzle tray and I do periodically feel I am making enough progress to come back to it periodically. I think that most puzzlers would hesitate to attempt the Circuit board and only a few more would be attracted to the Concertina wire because of the knowledge that it is a Chinese ring puzzle.

Grenade V by Shuai Chi made by Mr Gao

Having complained about string, I have to sheepishly admit that the new breed of designers are producing wire puzzles that are also immensely more difficult than the wire puzzles that I bought many years ago from Livewire. Many of those were incredibly tough but the wire from the likes of Aaron and Shuai Chi are several orders of magnitude more difficult. The Grenade series (there are currently 6 of them) look complex but not horrific but believe me when I say say that they are the very pinnacle of pure wire challenges. I have managed to get absolutely nowhere with them in a year of trying. At least I am not caught in an un fixable position but nothing I try seems to advance. 

Despite all of this apparent complaining, I adore these puzzles and have ordered a whole bunch of the 2026 releases (although only one which has string in it). I fully expect that most will be beyond my abilities and they will not end up on display but I will still have a lot of fun playing with them.

Now, Having spent a good while with the Concertina Wire and Dale's Elusive Chain Puzzle sitting on the table in front of of me whilst I type this, I have had an idea or two on how to progress so I had better get back to them now. Excuse me...

Think Where You Want To Be...

A Lesson For Life As Well As Puzzling

Python designed by DDK

It's been a tough week with long working days and yet another Saturday working too (rota writing this time). I sometimes think I am getting too old for all this. I had saved the Python puzzle bought from Aaron Wang until fairly late. I had heard that it was relatively easy to solve despite the level 10 assigned to it. I figured that when I reach a time where I have only a few hours to play, solve and write about something then I will be able to use this one.

I was sort of correct but also did not figure in a bit of a hiccough in the path. This puzzle teaches a good lesson to plan ahead and think about the direction you want to travel in. My! That's very deep for me...I am usually a pretty shallow person.

The first thing that threw me when I picked this puzzle up was that my copy had been sent to me with an incorrect start position. Compare the picture at the top with the diagram to the left. The shuttle is in the wrong place. Will this make it easier or harder?

I suspected that the puzzle had not been solved all the way back to the start position and that it would have a lower number of steps to separate the shuttle than it should. An alternative horrible thought did occur to me that to save time the maker had assembled the shuttle from open wire into the start position and had done it in the wrong place. If this was the case, had he placed it in an unsolvable position? Only time would tell. I set to work this morning.

This is clearly going to be an N-ary type puzzle but made interesting by the maze pathway to be navigated. This requires the choices of direction for the shuttle to be placed through the rings to be chosen carefully. At each point the ring can be fed through from either direction and only one is the correct one. Needless to say, I got lost a few times and ended up having to backtrack to where I made the mistake. After doing this a few times, I realised that trial and error was time consuming and less than fun. Time to think© yet again. I fed through a few times and watched the response as it moved and finally managed to see how the shuttle and ring interacted in a predictable way. At last I could choose my path deliberately and know where I was going. All I needed to do was decide which way through the maze. After about 20 minutes I had the shuttle:

First part of the solve

Having taken my photo, it was time to reassemble it and to aim for the correct start position. Easier said than done. I had no idea how that final stage of the reassembly was done because I had never navigated it. I would have to work out where I wanted to be and work out a way through the last part of the maze. It looks like a simple maze but is quite well blocked by this 3 rings on the left hand side. I managed to get almost there quite easily:

Close, but no cigar!

Getting that last step proved quite a challenge. I tried something and found myself inadvertently heading back to the beginning and then had to backtrack and think© yet again. Twice in one day for me gives me a bit of a headache! Eventually I managed it and we have a correctly assembled puzzle.

Got there in the end

This is a really delightful puzzle, it is N-ary but unlike the simple Chinese ring style, there are numerous decisions to make and positive choices are essential to simultaneously navigate the maze to where you need to be. My personal journey was actually made better by having to solve it differently as an assembly than as a disassembly. I would suggest that something like this might be a good step up after a beginner has solved the Chinese ring puzzle. If you live in North America then you should have a look at Aaron's other challenges currently available in PuzzleMaster. They may end up stocking some of these in the future as well.

Thank you Aaron and DDK.

I Think I Cheated...

Did I?

Rippl by DDK

I had hoped to be able to review a different type of puzzle for you today but despite weeks and weeks of trying, I have still not managed to finish the Free Me 9 puzzle from Joe Turner. I had been stuck on the second coin up until early in the week when a good puzzle friend and I started a combined attempt at solving it. Dominic gave me a little teeny hint and I suddenly found what I needed to free the second coin and now the two of us are stuck on the third - we are both noticing the same things, trying the same things and despite two of us doing the same thing over and over and over again, nothing seems to be changing for us...sigh!

In desperation and in the many many moments when I put down the Free me in disgust, I started playing with the Rippl puzzle from Aaron and managed to get very confused very quickly. The rings are threaded such that they straddle two "lanes" of the spirals and the shuttle is through all 8 of them. I thought that this would be a simple N-ary puzzle and with "only" 8 rings should not be too arduous. After all, it's ONLY a level 9 puzzle which must make it relatively simple?

Oh boy! I got a shock! Yet again! I explored this over the last week or so every time I put down the Free me puzzle. Mrs S was most displeased with me because this one really jingles a lot.

The shuttle comes off the first ring and the second very easily but then the third ring is completely blocked. I figured it was N-ary and went back to the first ring and replaced it hoping to get access where I needed it. Nope! That didn't work. I am sure that you noticed that the shuttle can be threaded through the rings both forward and reversed and after an embarrassingly long time, I also noticed that and after trying it with both the first and second rings, I found the one that worked. I had my access to the third ring and the shuttle was off of that one. 

And here I remained for over a week! I tried every combination of forward and back with the shuttle, through the rings forwards, through them in reverse and every single time I was blocked from releasing the shuttle from the fourth ring. What on earth was going on? I just could not get any further! What sort of puzzle blogger am I? A bloody useless one, I think - I should be ashamed of myself! There was a significant chance that there would be no blog post for you today! I have only ever missed one due to illness or death and really didn't want to do it again with no adequate excuse. Is being rubbish at puzzles an excuse?

Finally after 5 or 6 days I found a move. It had the desired effect of getting me access to the next ring but I wasn't happy with it. I kept putting the puzzle back to the beginning because that move I found did not seem right. It required me to slightly flex the spiral to allow the shuttle to be pulled through, I don't think any of DDK or Aaron's puzzles have ever needed even that tiny amount of force. So I kept returning to the beginning and trying afresh. Finally, this morning I bit the bullet and continued with that move and it opened up a whole new section of the puzzle which got very interesting very quickly. It also got really quite confusing but I was determined and carried on. Finally, just minutes before starting this post, I had a solved puzzle:

I have taken it apart but...
have I actually solved it?

Once I had taken my picture, I felt that I had better put it back together and check with Aaron whether I had cheated (I am pretty sure that I did on that one step). 

Erm...putting it back together was a whole extra challenge! I had, as usual, not really paid enough attention to how it came out and then got mightily confused when it would not go back in and when I did get it started on the return journey, I found that I could not seem to get the second ring on the shuttle. Wow! Despite being "only" a level 9, this was a really really tough challenge. Eventually I got to the mid point and tried the final moves to return to the start. Unfortunately one of the rings had unwound itself and was only held on one of the arms of the spiral and I hadn't noticed it. Another 30 minutes of swearing at it when I couldn't get it back to the start and then another 30 minutes swearing at my own stupidity when I noticed the problem. Finally it is back at the beginning and I am hoping to find out whether I had done something wrong at that crucial early step.

Yet again, an absolutely amazing and incredibly difficult puzzle from Aaron and DDK. It shows that disentanglement puzzles with wire only really can be incredibly tough and confusing - it has N-ary elements to it but only a couple of parts are - the challenge is navigating between them. Great value and a hugely bamboozling challenge. My head hurts now and I think I need to lie down for a while.

I Thought That I was On a Roll

But then...

Xmas Tree gift from Aaron

Every time I order a little batch of puzzles from Aaron, he includes a little (or even not so small in this case) extra puzzle in the package. This time it was this adorable little Xmas tree with a couple of baubles on it (attached in different ways to interfere with the slider movement and, of course, the obligatory piece to be removed. This puzzle has been absolutely beautifully made and almost reminds me of something that would have been produced by the wonderful and sadly missed LiveWire puzzles guys.

Having been successful last week with the Ball and chain puzzle that isn't, I couldn't resist playing with this one for a little light relief. Any of you who are better than an absolute beginner at disentanglement puzzles can look at this and immediately see where the exit point is but will also see how it is blocked by the baubles. The challenge here is to get past that part of the blocked path. I am absolutely delighted that with my huge experience of wire puzzles and (BLUSH!) embarassingly enormous collection (I have 6 plastic cases of them in my garage), I managed to solve this clever little challenge in about 10 minutes:

Delightful and not too tough

The sequence is absolutely delightful and fun to do repeatedly. It does show that a puzzle doesn't need to be impossibly difficult to still be fun. This is a nice one that I will be taking in to work with me as we approach the holiday season to bamboozle and hopefully delight my colleagues. I am due to work on Xmas day this year and it will be taken in with me.

Pipe

Pipe by the incredibly talented DDK was next on my list to try mostly because it looks quite a lot less fearsome than most of the others I received. This was partially true.

It is obvious where the name comes from and the aim is also obviously to remove the long shuttle. 

I always take a photo of the instruction sheet giving the setup position to aid my memory and also because it has the "idealised" position of the various components (the picture I took does look slightly different to the printed sheet). 

Having been encouraged with my early success with Pocket watch and Xmas tree, I immediately thought that this would actually be a nice (maybe arduous) N-ary puzzle and would be fun but easy. I genuinely thought I was being very clever doing this puzzle next and that there would be an easy blog post for me. I was wrong about the easy bit - maybe I should have paid attention to the Level 10+?

Initially, I thought that the left side of the puzzle (bowl of the pipe) must be the exit and started moving the shuttle through the centre of the puzzle towards it. I quickly found that this led to a dead end - I could work my way out that end but immediately any further moves are blocked by the rings. Like an eejit, I tried this same thing multiple times before coming to the correct conclusion and abandoning that approach. I went back to the picture and with the idealised positioning, I think that most of you should be able to see what looks like an obvious exit point for the shuttle. This should lead to you being able to formulate an initial plan to begin manoeuvring towards that exit. Unfortunately, within a few minutes I made the horrible realisation that the shuttle is actually inside the centre of this new exit point and it was definitely not going to be an easy task to get there. I was stuck for a while. As the week went by, I got a bit desperate and even brought it into the living room during our evening TV watching. Mrs S gave me a telling off again but she must be mellowing a bit because she did it with a smile. Not even a mention of a Whack! Ouch!

I was stuck at this point for a couple of days as I struggled to see how I could aim for that exit point without the shuttle being caught in the middle of it. It is important to notice that several of the rings are large and several are too small to pass the shuttle through. his is an important feature which helps but also confuses. I tried something completely new and suddenly I had made progress - I was not sure whether it was correct but I carried on. At one point I performed multiple moves and.... I was back at the beginning! How the?? I had no idea how I managed to undo things without realising it and took a deep breath before starting again and this time I got a bit further (I thought so, but it is quite difficult to remember every position that you have been in). I continued along what seemed like a promising path and occasionally reached a blockage which needed a little thought©. After a few days, the shuttle came out with me having only a slight idea of how I had achieved it:

That was fun and much tougher than expected

I left it like this for a day or so and then bit the bullet and started the reassembly. Oh boy! This really made it clear that I had not fully understood my sequence. I was able to get the process started but, as I progressed, my hopes kept getting dashed when suddenly and unexpectedly, the shuttle came back out again. This happened several times! Time to think© properly!

Here I realised that I needed to look at the diagram and work out a specific approach to traveling a particularly problematic ring which kept turning me around back to the exit. Having thunk© and arranged my puzzle like the picture, I tried again and finally after a whole week of play on this one I had my success.

The Pipe is a genius design which looks much easier than it actually is. It has some N-ary portions to the sequence but is not truly an N-ary puzzle. I would liken it more to the tree puzzle that I reviewed at the early on in this PuzzleMad odyssey but a lot more confusing.

Thank you DDK, for the challenge and thank you Aaron, for the opportunity.

Aaron Proves That Einsteinian Insanity Works For Me!

Spear & Shield
designed by DDK and hand made by Aaron Wang

For the last few years Aaron Wang has offered a whole bunch of wonderful new disentanglement puzzles for sale before the IPP begins. Every year I buy a big bunch of them and over a very long period of time solve a couple and completely fail to solve all of the rest. I always thought that I was quite good at disentanglement puzzles but since virtually meeting Aaron I realise that I’m actually rubbish at them.

He ranks the difficulty level on a scale of 1 to 10 and then 10+ beyond that and almost every single puzzle that he sells seems to be 10 or +. It may very well be that this is the reason that I can’t solve the bloody things! However, this may not be true - below is the Telescope puzzle which, allegedly, is a level 7 and I can’t for the life of me get anywhere near solving it:

Just level 7? Not for me, it’s not!

The Spear and shield looks fairly simple.

There are just 2 moderately complex pieces that are interlinked and a single obvious exit point. There is no string, no hinge, nothing that even gives a hint of why this is a level 10+ puzzle.

The complicating factor for the design here is that each of the pieces is formed by a double loop and the starting position has both double loops interlocked with each other. To me, it just looked like a matter of sort unwinding them and moving from two interlocking loops to one and then off and this is what I set out to do…way back in August 2022 when they arrived.

Let’s just say that I have attempted to solve this every few months ever since then and gotten absolutely nowhere!

The advantage of a puzzle involving string is that there are so many wonderfully inventive ways that you can make the string interact with the wire holding it in place. Also the disadvantage of a puzzle involving string is that there are so many wonderfully inventive ways that you can make the string interact with the wire holding it in place. If you don’t have a quick reset mechanism then it’s easy to end up with a knot that can leave you with a dead puzzle after a bit of play. So here we have no string which means that the disadvantage of having lots of ways to destroy your puzzle have been removed but also that advantage mentioned above isn’t there and you have very limited number of ways to make the parts interact. I quickly found a very nice way to make the M shaped area interact with the exit point and this led to a little unwinding of the double interlock. However, it always seemed to lead to having a single wire tangled in a double.

For quite a long time, this was all I had. Supposedly, the likelihood of achieving a position that you cannot get out of is lower for pure wire puzzles. Well, I must be very talented because I got to a single wire interlock and couldn’t get back to the beginning or advance in the solution. I kept trying a couple of very promising sequences only to always return to my incorrect position. I couldn’t advance and I couldn’t backtrack! Aaargh! This "dead puzzle" condition continued for a month or two and I did the same moves over and over again and then one time, despite doing the same thing as always, I was back at beginning. Amazing Einsteinian insanity in practice! I have no idea what happened.

This week, I have been up in Edinburgh for a little bit of holibobs (including a few visits to the outlaws) and I brought a few toys with me to play with. The advantage of disentanglement puzzles is that they take up very little space. The spear and shield came out quite early on and I began my insane sequence…yet again! I got to my odd intermediate position and somehow was able to move back and forth this time from here to the beginning. I could not progress, however.

Until suddenly, I could! I have absolutely no idea what I did differently, but I had moved one locked wire out of place. Yet again, doing the same thing over and over again had ended up with a different result this one time!

I think I have discovered a new puzzle genre - the Quantum Puzzle!

Having moved one locked area to somewhere else, despite not understanding how, it was immediately clear what was required next. It was a bit awkward to achieve it without force but a few minutes later, I had a new photo!

Spear and Shield (no idea which is which)
And no idea how to put it back together again!

I was all flushed with success, I had a new photo to be taken and a story for my website but my new quantum puzzle has a problem. I have to assume that there is a paired puzzle somewhere else in the universe that is now in the starting position and this one is entangled with it. I’ll never get this back together until someone else (an alien maybe) solves the other one wherever it may be. I have tried to return this back to the starting position for most of the week and simply cannot do it. I guess it will take me another year and doing the same move over and over again until one day something different happens.