Is There No End To His Talents?

Dovetail Bar by Richard Williams

The various members of the MPP brigade seem to have a variety of skillz which we have revealed to the puzzling world either deliberately or inadvertently over the last 14 odd years - at the last MPP Ali was reminiscing about how long ago the whole thing was started and who was there. I think I joined at MPP 4 or 5.

I, of course, have revealed to the world that I like to write drivel and unfortunately have also shown the world that I am rubbish at puzzles in the process of writing said drivel. Louis has shown us all that he is a puzzle solving machine and that there seems to be nothing that he cannot figure out (although I've never seen him do a twisty). Allard has revealed that he has impeccable taste in puzzles but needs the assistance of Louis to actually solve the bloody things. Big Steve brings chaos and destruction wherever he goes and usually leaves a trail of puzzles in pieces or incorrectly assembled with other pieces hidden inside (I'm never bringing my happiness cubes anywhere near him ever again!) and his partner in crime/puzzles, Ali seems to be able to solve pretty much anything put in front of him. There puzzle design creativity has a whole store now and has received me of a decent amount of cash. Of course, we cannot forget Shane as you can hear him several miles before you can see him - his skill with locks is amazing! 

Over the last few years, Richard Williams has joined the group and we all seem to know him as an incredible burr talent. He seems to be able to do the impossible by assembling burrs from just a pile of pieces (only the late and dearly missed Laurie had anywhere near that talent). Since his purchase of a 3D printer he has begun to design puzzles at an alarming rate. Today I am going to focus on 3 that I obtained at the last MPP (number LCIIIIX - looking that Roman numeral up in Google reveals it to be a nonsense number so I must have imagined the gathering.

The Dovetail Bar was one that I purchased knowing almost nothing about it apart from the fact that Ali was sitting next to me with a few pieces of it in his hands and marvelling at the mechanism. If Ali is enthusiastic then that's enough for me! A few of the UK's finest plastic banknotes were exchanged and I received the Dovetail Bar as well as the Basket burr (see later in the post).

I didn't attempt the puzzle until a day or so after I got back from the party. I had to hide most of my acquisitions from the present Mrs S for fear of reprisals (Whack! Ouch! sorry dear). 

This delightful challenge consists of a small red plastic rectangle 60 x 40 x 15mm in size which is split into a top ¼ and a bottom ¾ held together by a dovetail joint and with a black bolt screwed into the larger part. It rattles enticingly and the top part wiggles a couple of mm each way but no further - this is the case no matter which way the puzzle is held. After trying this there is not much else to do other than unscrew the bolts. As each one is unscrewed there is a little catching of something inside but nothing new is possible and once that catch is overcome, there is a little noise as something moves. Removing first one bolt doesn't let the dovetail slide and then unscrewing the other one similarly makes noises but doesn't help with movement either. At this point, with not many options, the bolts go back in and are made to achieve something inside. This was not entirely unexpected as I had already begun to create an internal image of what was in there. Once a couple of internal interactions had been achieved, the dovetail was able to slide partially open and revealed what I had been expecting inside.

A small Aha! but not going any further than that

Having made the puzzle slide this far open, I had a few ideas as to what might be needed next. Now I am sure that almost all of you are screaming at me through your screens that I needed to spin it to align the interior pins properly. That approach has been tried before by very famous puzzle designers but remember the instructions above

"No tapping, no banging, no spinning"

My ideas, at this point,  ran out! I removed the bolts and another tool that I had and slid it back together but at no point would the doevetail ever slide any further than that. depending on the orientation it would move either a few mm or about 15mm (but only inn one direction). Time for a little think©ing. Oddly, the two bolts are slightly different lengths and maybe that is important?

Ali had really been enthusiastic about the mechanism so there must be something quite special inside. I put it back together and left it for the evening and came back to it the following evening after a day's work and thinking. There seemed to be nothing for it other than do do something dangerous and hope it didn't backfire on me. I tried that and that didn't help  but there were other alternatives which needed a little more thought to make possible. After another few minutes of fiddling I separated the two pieces and could see the locking mechanism.

Solved! No spoilers here.

What I couldn't tell was how the damned thing worked! I had a few pieces now and the reason why it would wiggle a bit and then move 15mm only was obvious and ingenious but it was not clear what I had done to actually make it slide apart this time. With the innards visible, it was possible to play with the various pieces to see what was going on inside and the mechanism is really quite clever. I don't think I've seen it done before.

Resetting it takes a bit more thought and it is still a bit of a challenge to open again. We all think of Rich as a "burr meister" but here he has revealed that he is that and a whole lot more! If you get a chance to buy a copy or even just play with it for half an hour then you should definitely go for it. It's not too difficult but the Aha! moment is wonderful - I now understand Ali's delight.

The Tetrahedral burr

This made an appearance at the previous MPP and I had a little fiddle then but did not dismantle it. The copy above is the original which Rich gave to me because he had made another copy with some improvements that were able to get rid of the slight gaps visible above. It looks like an assembly puzzle with shapes that need to be stacked onto each other to make a multi-coloured tetrahedron. It certainly could be an assembly puzzle but its classification is actually different. It is, in reality, a "standard" 6-piece burr!

Its "just" a Ghost 4x4
A standard cube made much more confusing

Yes, Rich has taken a standard burr (I don't actually know whether it is one of the well known ones) and used the 3D printing software to add extensions to the burr sticks so that they form a different end shape. The process has been made even more challenging by reading the extensions in such a way that the orientation of the interior burr is now off centre. This process is well known in the twisty puzzle world as "ghosting" - it takes a standard shape, rotates layers and then adds pieces to make the rotated puzzle back into the cube shape.

So we have a shape with odd pieces that do move linearly but not along any of the axes of the tetrahedron and they interact with each other just as many burr puzzles do but in a much more confusing manner! Because it's a 6-piece burr, there aren't actually many false passages but I found it very hard to keep track of what was moving where and did very much need to rely on my back and forth approach. At some point it splits apart and I decided that I would make a video for myself and a sequence of still photos to ensure that I didn't get stuck with a pile of pieces. Having done that, I carried on and disassembled the 2 halves and took my photo:

OMG it looks so innocuous 
You can see the burr shape inside

I scrambled the pieces and left them for a while. I don't think that this can be modelled in Burrtools as a tetrahedron - of course, the internal burr can but that won't help me solve the puzzle. The reassembly took me over an hour! Had I not known the rough arrangements of the two halves, there would be no way that I could solve it but with the little knowledge I had and a very slight recollection of the moves needed, I could reassemble. The process is huge fun! Another one for all of you to try - even those of you who aren't in to burrs will find this one different enough to interest you.

Basket burr

Another of Rich's designs which was shown off at two successive MPPs. The basket burr is reminiscent of the Akaki's Basket packing puzzles (I only have the wooden ones from Cubic Dissection but wish I had the whole set). This is another "standard" 6-piece burr in a frame which forms the bottom part of a basket. I have adored, framed or caged burrs for many years and have so many that I can't even estimate how many. Some of the 12 piece caged burrs are incredibly difficult and §i haven't solved them all but the 6 piece ones are fascinating and usually more achievable. To my shame, I have never managed to disassemble the Congestion burr. 

Rich's Basket burr is very achievable as a disassembly puzzle being level 21 (12.1.1.1.4.2) and the assembly would be impossible for me without having some idea of the process of disassembly first. Of course, Burrtools is a help and an essential part of any burr for me and I was very surprised to find that there were 64 different solutions but the colour scheme chosen by Rich ensures that the most difficult one is the one to aim for. I now need to work on finding some other assemblies - this could take me quite some time!

Very clever discovery by Rich

There seems to be absolutely no end to his talents! I cannot wait to see what he comes up with next. Thanks mate, for a really fun week of puzzling!

He Risks A Whack! Ouch!

But He "Creeps" Past It! Phew!

This required wine...LOTS of wine

When Mine offers puzzles, most of us say yes and we wait for a bit for hime to manufacture said puzzles and postage occurs when you least expect it. My package went into my tracking app and for some reason went from Japan to China and then on to India. I have no idea why - my knowledge of shipping lanes and flight paths is sketchy to say the least but even I know that is an odd path to take to the UK. The tracking stopped in India for a week or so and I resigned myself to waiting for a long time. The app and the Yamato website had no further updates. In the meantime...

Tye Stahly also manufactures some new toys and puts them up for sale. The UK puzzlers have a good thing going as he combines them all together into what I imagine is a shipping container which heads towards Allard's house and very forgiving wife (Gill is an angel!) I knew the shipping container had set off but I didn't know more. It must have been a very fast ship or maybe even one of those airyplane things because after just a few days from going on sale to somehow being forwarded on by the PuzzleMan himself to arriving at PuzzleMad HQ was incredibly fast. 

Both boxes arrived on the same day and due to work commitments, I didn't get to open them straight away. I have worked yet another 6 day week and "she who must be feared" got fed up having two medium sized boxes sitting in the porch cluttering up the place. She obviously hadn't thought it through properly because boxes in the porch don't really count as clutter. It's only when you open said boxes to find a total of 16 new puzzling toys on the kitchen work surface that you realise what clutter is! Whack! Ouch!

Yes, she actually opened the boxes for me and laid out the pile o' puzzles on the kitchen granite for me. When I got home from work on Saturday, she stood there glaring at me and menacingly tapped her foot whilst I made excuses. In the end I couldn't really think of any decent excuses and offered her wine to make up for it. This mollified her a little bit so I tried more wine but it didn't help much and I suspect I'm going to suffer in the near future. To try and improve the situation, I have taken my photos and have endeavoured to stash them somewhere not cluttered until I have had a chance to play. Phew! I might have got away with it. Whack! Ouch! Maybe not...

The first one I have tried was one by the amazing Yuu Asaka. I couldn't resist the Creep 2 puzzle which looked so different from his usual packing puzzles:

Creep 2 pieces

The stated aim on the box (the puzzles from Yuu-san are always beautifully presented) is to insert the two sliders completely inside the tray.

It is only a level 2 out of 5 and the expected puzzling time should be about 20 minutes according to the designer. Well we will see about that! I am famous/infamous for taking days or weeks instead of minutes.

This puzzle reminded me very much of a wonderful puzzle by Robrecht Louage, the Cerradura Doble.

Off we go...

The gaps in the frame at each edge are different sizes which should give a clue to which pieces go where and indeed, I was able to quite quickly determine then final position of the two sliders. There's nothing else to do other than to slide them each inside in turn and look at how they will interact as you move the pieces back and forth. At this point, I realised that Yuu-san is what is known in the trade as a "sneaky bugger"! I spent the full amount of time (20 minutes) trying the same thing over and over again but it just wouldn't work. Did I have the wrong pieces? I actually checked the pieces against on-line photos and there was no mistake - silly me ( or...I'm an eejit).

Time to think© and it hurt a bit. Eventually, I had an aha! moment when I realised my initial supposition had been incorrect. Once I had made my discovery, I had my solved puzzle and it's really quite satisfying. The whole puzzle seems to be about misdirection. The design makes you think the wrong thing and if you are anything like me, you will be stuck on that wrong thought for a while before eventually forcing yourself to look further. It is really very clever and almost perfect for newbies or visitors to the house who you would like to bamboozle. I think I will take it to work to torture people for a while. Hopefully Mrs S will not murder me when she sobers up/regains consciousness from the barrel of wine I have had to ply her with!

If you are wanting to buy a copy then PuzzleMaster has it for sale here and you could even buy the rest of Yuu-san's puzzles at the same time. In the UK you could try JPGames or Crux puzzles.

Pelikan Final Release of 2024

Puzzles just released by Pelikan puzzles

This may well be a little late for many of you who don't keep an eye out on the Pelikan website or follow me on Facebook. I received a package out of the blue about 10 days ago and had very little time at first to do any more than open it and take my photos. I am definitely not clever enough to solve all of these challenging puzzles in just 5 days and Jakub wanted to get them up for sale before he and his team go off on their well-earned Christmas break. These puzzles went up for sale on Thursday and I'm afraid that at least 2 are sold out already. If there is anything that you particularly want to buy then keep an eye on the auction sites or see whether Jakub might agree to make another batch - sometimes if enough people ask then he does get agreement from the designers to make a few more.

In this release there are some truly stunning and clever designs:
Minima Smiley by Frederic Boucher
Trimini Frame by Lucie Pauwels
Euklid's Cabrio by Dr Volker Latussek
Nested Soma by Dr Volker Latussek with Lucie Pauwels
Lunchbox by George Miller

Minima Smiley

There have been quite a lot of Minima puzzles over the last few years. The series started out as fun small packing puzzles with relatively simple pieces to fit in a small box with restricted entry and usually some odd holes or slots to allow rotations to occur. I have now bought lots and lots of these and thoroughly love the combination of thought, fiddling and Aha! moments. Several other designers have jumped on the Minima bandwagon and I have, of course, added these to my collection (partially thanks to Tye Stahly's Nothing Yet Designs site as well as Jakub and Jaroslav's Pelikan puzzles. 

When I received this one, I really wasn't sure what to make of it. All the pieces were inside and there seemed to be a ball in there too as well as a bolt in the side. What on earth was going on here. It cannot be a packing puzzle - is it an unpacking puzzle? Does such a thing exist? It would appear that Frederic has branched out into other genre's again (remember the amazing Res Q and my own special Visitor Q?) This time the aim is to work out how to release the ball.

Initially only the ball moves from one empty space to another but no further than that and therefore the only thing available to me was to remove the bolt. I got a bit of a surprise at the sheer length of it! After removal, there was suddenly the ability to slide a piece around and this opened up a bit of pathway for the ball. Except it wouldn't go very far and then nothing else happens. I was able to work out what the shapes were inside the box and map them out - there is absolutely no way any more is going to happen. Now I know that Frederic is a sneaky so and so and Jakub is very happy to encourage this sneakiness. A little exploration with fingers revealed something interesting and also some rather strong magnets. a tiny bit more progress happens but I get stuck again. Whilst exploring at this point, I realise that a piece can rotate and I eagerly encourage it only to find it doesn't really help me. Once I realised this, I tried to get it all back to the start and, OMG, it wouldn't go! Cue, minor panic before I got it all reset after 15 minutes of swearing at myself whilst Mrs S giggled at me and said that I don't seem to be very good at this puzzling business - oh, the shame!

I was stumped and had to draw the shapes and the box to work out a possible alternative sequence. Only after I had drawn it out was I able to make further steps and I could see the reason for the name of the puzzle:

Now I have to get the little bugger back inside

Having taken my photo, I tried to reset it, only to hear a lout "clack!" as the pieces reset themselves. OMG, my heart leapt into my throat again and I was forced to work it out from scratch again. For a while I kept trying it wrong and repeatedly heard that clack again and again until I realised the move needed to prevent it.

This is wonderful - very clever and shows that Frederic is able to set his talented brain to all types of puzzle. It has been absolutely beautifully made by Pelikan in Mahogany and Maple.

Trimini Frame

Trimini Frame by Lucie Pauwels

There have been a couple of incredible packing puzzle/antislide puzzles by Lucie this year (Minimal Frame and Open Frame which is still available as I type). I really struggled even to solve the basic packing element of these and completely failed with both of them to solve the antislide challenge. I was amazed at the last MPP when Wil Strijbos sidled up to me and showed me the he had solved it in about 10 minutes. I shouldn't have been surprised as the man is a total genius at design and solving. That display made me all the more determined to succeed at the latest of the challenges. Based on a triangular grid there are 8 oddly shaped pieces to place in a frame with only a single triangular voxel at the corner to hold the pieces in place.

Pepper Castor (another triangular grid)

This time I decided to be more analytical rather than just randomly place pieces in the tray. My usual approach to packing puzzles really isn't terribly efficient. A little trial and error revealed that certain pieces would either have to be oriented a particular direction if the abutted an edge or they would need to be positioned in the interior. This realisation was the key and significantly decreased the number of random moves. It didn't make it easy by any stretch but a true analytical approach made this solvable even by an eejit like me! After about 30 minutes of swearing under my breath, I had a true Aha! moment and it was solved. Absolutely wonderful to play with a triangular grid for once (very few designers do this - the best that I can recall is Alexander Magyaric's Play-girl and Play-boy puzzles as well as his Pepper Castor). There are still 13 in stock as I type - well worth buying to challenge yourself and even non-puzzlers.

Euklid's Cabrio

Euklid's Cabrio by Dr Volker Latussek

This is the second in the Cabriolet series from Dr Latussek. The use of the sliding-lid box has been used before by Hajime Katsumoto and Mineyuki Uyematsu with Slide Packing which I wrote about in 2016. The original Cabrio was a wonderful challenge on similar lines with Volker's own little twist. Of course, Volker is always exploring variations on what he has done before and surprisedmhimself when he found a way to use the Euclid type blocks with the Cabrio style box and we have an incredible challenge as a result which will really keep you think©ing for a while.

Interesting pieces

On arrival the lid is just sitting on top of the pieces and there's no way to slide it on. The aim is to find out which pieces go in the lid and which in the base which will allow it to slide together. A quick exploration revealed to me a really nice looking arrangement of the pieces which would fill those criteria. It looked beautiful! You knew as soon as you read that, that my arrangement was going to be wrong. Volker would never let the obvious solution be the correct one! I spent a good hour or so desperately trying to get that to work and it was totally impossible! The sliding pieces just wouldn't reach far enough to allow subsequent pieces to go in. Think©! There must be another way. 

Not only is this a packing puzzle...this is a sliding piece puzzle. Getting everything in place is going to need careful placement and then careful jiggling about inside to make room for subsequent pieces. I needed another couple of days to figure this one out in my head (luckily there is plenty of space in there). I let out a huge shout when I finally closed the box with all the pieces inside - that man is a genius!

Make sure that you pay proper attention to what you do and how the pieces sit inside because it will require an exact sequence of moves to get them out again and initially you will be blind with a box that is closed or only opens a little bit. As you would expect, I got the box stuck in the closed position for a panicked hour as I shook it about and desperately tried to work out how to open the bloody thing! I actually had to sit down for a bit and think to open it and felt a sudden urge for a gin when I finally did it. I have managed it a few times since then and it is incredibly clever. This is an essential to all followers of Volker and all packing aficionados. 

Nested Soma

Nested Soma - a collaboration by Lucie Pauwels and Dr Volker Latussek

Lucie has recently designed a new puzzle in the Minima series, the Minima nest (I haven't gotten around to it yet), and she decided to try and create a bigger version using a shifted 3x3x3 box. When Volker saw the puzzle idea, he suggested that she try and use slightly altered Soma pieces and sent her a couple of designs for the pieces and then the Nested Soma was born.

The manufacturing skill for this puzzle is totally off the scale! It is stunning made from Elm and Bubinga. The puzzle screams to fit the pieces inside and as you do so it quickly gets blocked up leaving spaces inside that cannot be reached. Time to solve it outside of the box and then you realise that it isn't very stable when the pieces are piled up on a table or your lap. A combination approach would be good. My trial and error approach rapidly failed. There are some very peculiar shapes which have to be fitted into a very restricted part of the box and quite quickly I saw that one piece could only fit in a particular orientation and, gulp, it needed a rotational move - Burrtools won't help much here.

I spent about an hour having increasingly useful breakthroughs and inched my way forwards progressively. The final Aha! moments are delicious. I have posted the solved puzzle because it appears on the Pelikan page - it's a minimal spoiler as most of it cannot be seen.

Solved - really not much of a spoiler here

Lunchbox

Lunchbox by George Miller

I think this might be my first puzzle by George which is strange because he has been very prolific for a very long time. Recently he and Roxanne have been focussed on creating the greatest puzzle museum in the world. 

George wrote this about it:

"Lunchbox is a variation of a puzzle I found in a pile of puzzles I had purchased in Prague. One of the puzzles was simply 10 pieces of wood with no clue as to the goal. I guessed it had to be a symmetric solid shape and began to explore all of the possibilities. This was, in essence, a meta puzzle – that is – and the goal, then solve the puzzle by stacking the pieces into the shape of the goal. The ten pieces were all the ways four 2 unit squares of one unit thickness could be glued together at with two unit cubes cubes glued to the squares to form a checkered patterns on each piece.

I made a copy of the ten pieces on a 3D printer. I used BurrTools to test using these ten pieces to pack a 4x5x3 shape I called a “sandwich”. I forced the squares to the top and bottom and the red cubes to the middle making it look ever so much like a jelly sandwich.

A simple packing puzzle is fun, but making a good puzzle involves a presentation mode plus a theme or story. A presentation mode too often is simply the solved puzzle. This takes away the pleasure of a discovered solution. Again, using BurrTools I found a solid packing of a set of steps with a unique solution. This led to the development of a box in the shape of a lunch pail with the inside conforming to the shape of the set of stairs. The story then becomes that of a young lad taking to school a lunchbox prepared by his mother. When he opens the box he finds his lunch in many pieces he has to pack together into a delicious sandwich before eating his lunch. Putting the pieces back into the lunchbox presents a puzzle unto itself."

This challenge is incredibly well presented - it arrives in one of the solved positions with the pieces packed in the box. Tipping them out reveals the wonderful variety of ways that 2 cubies can be placed on the 4 tetrominoes with gaps.

All the tetrominoes with checkerboard patterns

The first challenge is to create a sandwich from the contents of the lunchbox. Jakub has made the pieces in such a way that it looks like a piece of meat between 2 slices of white bread. I initially attempted to make it so that only checkerboard pieces were next to each other. This seriously restricted the pieces that I could try in each position but left me unable to form the 4x5x3 shape. Once I had determined that it might be impossible with pure checkerboard positioning, I looked at other arrangements and with some thought created lunch:

One ham sandwich

Burrtools tells me that there are another 3 ways to make my sandwich - I will keep working on it. Getting the pieces back into the box has so far proven impossible for me. I know the shape to achieve and it is not a simple cuboid which seems to be confusing me. I will be using Burrtools in the meantime. 

Unlike the sandwich, the orientation of the white bread is not all in the same direction which seems to confuse my feeble brain a lot. It is very similar to the Tabula cubes I wrote about way back in 2013 which I really struggled with:

Tabula cube 1	Tabula cube 2
Tabula cube 1 pieces	Tabula cube 2 pieces

These puzzles are selling very fast - order them quick if you don't want to miss out. They are all amazing. My favourites are Minima Smiley, Nested Soma and Euklid's Cabrio.

Trays and Trays of Thought

A Plethora of torture from Alexander

I will say it up front - Alexander Magyarics is one of the best puzzle designers out there. I don't say it because I consider him a friend, I say it because he has proven it time and time again! You all know it from the rather large number of his designs that have been created by Jakub and Jaroslav's Pelikan puzzles team that have made it into all of our collections. Quite a few of his puzzles have made it into my top ten puzzles of the year and they include 3D packing puzzles with incredible shapes (sometimes requiring rotations and sometimes just rectilinear moves), there are now even a few burrs under his belt which are not just a creation made using the Burrtoools software aimed at getting the highest level possible - the important thing about Alex's creations are that they are interesting and require the dreaded thought© to be solved. This requires something very special or very warped in the head - I leave it up to you to decide.

For the last couple of Xmases Alex has made me a lovely and not so little care package of puzzles he has both designed and 3D printed himself (Sigh! I wish I was allowed a 3D printer but if I wish to keep all parts of my anatomy attached then that is not going to happen). I received 14 of them this time and Mrs S was less than impressed (one thing about 3D printed puzzles is that they do look like child's toys and are not attractive i.e. no "wife appeal"). I reassured "she who frightens police officers to death" that they would be kept out of sight and not left on display anywhere and put them in my study in yet another box of puzzles to be solved - my goodness, I have a huge backlog just now!

This last 10 days "she who makes the sun hide in fear" was up in Sconny Botland visiting the outlaws and I was free to leave stuff lying around and play with them at my leisure. I actually did not have much time to myself due to work but the advantage of tray puzzles is that they take up very little space and can be carried around easily. I had some other toys in transit from various parts of the world and until they arrived had nothing that "had" to be solved fast. Time to play with the packing puzzles.

Rhinnocent

Alex had suggested that I start with this one (I had asked in desperation at preserving my ego for the easier ones). Place 5 of them in the smaller tray and then all 7 in the larger one. Usually I am truly awful at this type of thing and find that all I do is trial and error over and over again because after a while I cannot remember what I have tried before. I started in exactly the same way but within a minute or so, I was able to see some vague logic to them and was able to direct my approach. Wow! I had the small tray done in about 5 minutes and then the larger one in a further 15 or so. Amazing - a feeling of achievement and think©ing had occurred!

1 Billion

This was the second one he told me to do and I really wasn't sure about it. It is very attractive and quite clearly had been designed using Burrtools - how else could he know that there was ONLY one solution? I found initially that I began to place pieces randomly and quickly found myself blocked but there must have been a reason for suggesting this as an early challenge. Alex had asked me why I thought it was called 1 Billion? I suspected because that might be how many years it might take me and hopefully asked whether it was because there was actually 1 billion ways to solve it. I still don't know why the name! Having failed a couple of times, I realised that there are some very complex shapes for some of the pieces and they are very limited in where they can go. Why not start with them? Then move to progressively less complex shapes. After a couple of blind ends in the solve, I had it. Yet again, a tray packing puzzle that required thought© and very little random placement. This is sheer genius design!

Pieces of my Heart

I couldn't resist this one as my next challenge - it looked relatively straightforward - the aim being to create a full heart with it placed in the top left corner. This is Alex's first sliding tile puzzle. I usually find these unrewarding due to the large number of random moves to try and an enormous decision tree that eventually gets created. This apparently can be solved with 45 moves (I did not manage to do it that quickly). Having had such a great time with the previous puzzles I felt that there must be something special about this one too and I was not wrong. Unusually for one of these, the first bunch of moves are very constrained and there is only one path for quite a while. After that, I reached a decision point and took the wrong turn (as usual) but was not led up a huge long dead end with lots of other paths to rule out on the way. The blind ends are relatively short and sweet, requiring a backtrack and searching elsewhere. My memory is awful and this puzzle never required me to commit huge long sequences to memory. I found hot quite rewarding to finally reach the end point - I suspect that about 150-200 moves was used in the end after false paths and backtracking. I may even try it again to see if I can do it in a shorter sequence. Don't look if you don't want to see the end positions.

Possible in 45 moves? Not by me!

Finally, I couldn't resist one of Alex's multiple challenge puzzles. The fun thing about a huge number of his packing puzzles from last year as well as this year (and even some of the Pelikan puzzles like Sliders) have multiple challenges to them. I decided to strat with the rather beautiful ICEbreaker:

The pieces look simple (3 copies of the word ICE) and the first challenge had 256 solutions. Now, that is my type of puzzle - even I can solve it (hopefully). Again, this has been created with the aim to make you think© and it worked! My first trial and error attempts failed and I had to look at how the letters interacted with each other. This made it much easier and I quickly found one of those 256. I have not searched for lots more as I won't be able to remember what I have done before. The next challenge with the constraint of having alike letters touching was much more difficult but still a pleasurable experience. Challenge 3 nearly had me giving up - fill the tray leaving gaps in two diagonally opposite corners. I tried to be clever and look at the best way to pack tightly and leave a voxel free in those corners. Well, me being clever usually ends in disaster and I was not disappointed. I spent a good 45 minutes trying the same thing over and over again and it would not work. I then tried something else that was much less clever and this ended in the solved puzzle. I retrospectively entered the pieces into Burrtools to look at the solution set for this challenge and was interested to see that the tightest interaction that could leave a corner empty is not one of the solutions - have I said that this man is a genius? He perfectly led me astray and made me waste my time on something impossible! Challenge 4 was going to be impossible for me and I decided to try for the anti slide challenge. Take 2 sets of ICE and put them in the tray in such a way that none of the pieces can slide.

I have only played with a few anti slide puzzles before and have found that I just do not have the skill set to solve them. Many people at IPPs have loved them and a few have been entered into the design competition. I have played and failed before. But Alex has challenged me and I had to at least try. The problem here is that the pieces are all quite open and the tray quite big when you are only using 2 sets of pieces. I was very surprised at how much fun this was. I initially had pieces freely sliding in an ocean of space and then worked to get them tangled. Progress is very much stepwise as I found that changing positions of some pieces sort of locked bits up but not enough to prevent them all from sliding. I gradually worked my way through moving more and more pieces until there was a big Aha! moment. I had solved my first anti slide puzzle and it was good! I doubt that this will become a favourite genre but it's definitely worth a try and a big bonus as an additional challenge in a tray packing puzzle.

I still have a whole bunch of these to try and a few will always be in my work bag to be taken out during a quiet time. Thank you Alex for a wonderful gift and restoring my faith in my abilities!

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Brass Monkey Sixential Discovery Puzzle (BM6)

Yes, it has arrived and the preorders close today. If you want the chance of a slightly early arrival and free shipping then get to the Two Brass Monkey site quickly and place your order. Allard loved his experience of solving the prototype. I have spent a several hours on mine and have not even found the first step (sigh, I am not very bright!) There is a lot of interesting stuff to be seen and it is going to be a huge challenge.

If you wait then it goes on sale formally on February 4th.

Counting to 4 in the Correct Order

Number Blocks

Mrs S has been away for over a week visiting the Outlaws. She returned home yesterday whilst I was at work and this meant a  flurry of cleaning up my mess (with dozens of puzzles lying all over the house) and then making the place look vaguely presentable and doing a bit of my assigned DIY over the last few days. This has left me knackered but at least I have managed to solve a few puzzles to blog about. Today I have a lovely puzzle that was great fun and is absolutely perfect to take to work for "normal people" to play with. It's a little bit of a shock to have to finally admit after all these years that I am "not normal"! 😱😱

Recently, I had a little chat with Tom Lensch via email when I was seeking a copy of his award winning 4 Pac puzzle designed by Hajime Katsumoto. This had been very highly rated by Allard as well as appearing a few times in the EPP book. Of course, Tom always has a bunch of creations on the go at any one time and sometimes has a few toys lying around from previous batches. He talked me into purchasing a new version of the Melting Block puzzle (it has a bunch of gloriously coloured woods which I couldn't resist) as well as the Number blocks by Goh Pit Khiam.

New Melting Block

4 Pac

I immediately fiddled with the 4 Pac and realised that this was going to take some serious working out time which I didn't have straight away and suspected that the New Melting Block might be totally beyond me, so I started on the Number blocks. 

This gorgeous puzzle was created and entered into the IPP design competition way back in 2015 where it won a Jury honourable mention award. It has been reviewed by Jerry Loo who really enjoyed the solving. I am not entirely certain how I missed out on this one (I suspect that I ran out of budgeted funds or had been treated with terrible bodily harm by "she who frightens the bejeezus out of me"). I already have the Arrow blocks and the Road blocks already and very much enjoyed them. 

The aim of the puzzle is to convert one to orientation to another:

            1    2                1    2

                           →

            4    3                3    4

There are also several other orders that you can attempt but they are quite a lot simpler (although still a fun challenge). Obviously this cannot be like the traditional 15 puzzle - there is no gap to use to slide the pieces around with. Obviously something has to come out first and I discovered that by turning it over to look at the reverse of the tray: The 4 has no protrusions and then the other pieces can slide. Simple I thunk©, now I slide them into the correct position and reinsert the 4 piece. Of course, our good friend Pit would not have made it that easy - the sliding does move things about but you always get blocked no matter what direction you try. I guess that I had better take all the pieces out?

Now you can see why the puzzle isn't that simple

Maybe the tray needs to be rotated before trying my simple reinsertion? Nope, too easy - the tray just has a slot under the frame all the way around with no obstructions. Time to Think© again - ooh that's painful!

The challenge is not terribly difficult - I think it must have taken me about two hours over a couple of sittings. The lovely thing about this puzzle is that there are 2 very distinct Aha! moments before you can solve it. The first of them I came to quite quickly because whilst I'm not terribly bright, I am not entirely stupid! The second Aha! moment took much longer. I seemed to get fixated on trying one particular thing which was not going to work but I tried anyway...multiple times. Doh! Eventually I had my breakthrough and could count to 4:

I can finally reach 4!

I then brought this wonderful challenge to work where I tortured a few ODPs, nurses and medical students who needed a break from my barrage of information. It was really quite fun to watch them all go through the same process as me. The got fixated on the same problems and eventually had the same Aha! moments (occasionally with a little nudging) and were all delighted with the challenge.

This fabulous puzzle is well worth obtaining and sharing with friends if you can find a copy.

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Dale Shows Passion Before Wedding Vows are Allowed

Passion Puzzle by Dale Overy

I have enjoyed Dale's company at many MPPs over the years. He sits quietly solving stuff with ease and enjoys showing off new finds and new creations. He has a particular penchant for disentanglement puzzles which is a delight for me because so few puzzlers seem to really love them. I had purchased a few little toys from him at the last MPP and promptly hidden them when I got home so that Mrs S did not see me moving a bunch of extra toys into the house after a day away. With so much work on my plate, I promptly forgot them and only found them again whilst "she who makes murder hornets fly away in fear" was away.

The Passion puzzle may look very familiar - it looks rather like the classic Wedding Vows puzzle which I reviewed in 2015. The aim is to move 1 bead across to the other side alongside its' lover. Of course, the bead will not fit through any of the holes in the puzzle. There are a number of similar looking puzzles that I have reviewed in the past but they have had very different solution paths. It is definitely not a hugely tough puzzle compared to the monstrosities that I have acquired from Aaron Wang or some of the worst of the sadly missed Livewire company puzzles. But the challenge is really quite fun and, dare I say it, probably suitable for beginners or non puzzlers.

The fun thing for me is the realisation that this lovely challenge is one step before the Wedding vows. You definitely need to go through the Passion puzzle stage before reaching the Wedding vows:

Very clever.

I still have a couple of others to play with from Dale that will keep me jingling and annoying "she who can freeze a lake with just a look". Whack! Ouch!

Type 4 Zig-zag design by Dick Hess

I have no idea what it is called - it's in Czech