Avast Me Hearties It's the Pirate's Casket

The Pirate's Casket from Carsten Elsäßer

Back in 2015 I received, totally out of the blue, 2 separate deliveries from an amateur puzzle designer and craftsman called Carsten Elsäßer. In March I really enjoyed his 2 Piece cube and marvelled at the craftsmanship which not only was of wood but included some very nicely made metal components which really takes some skill for an amateur to create. The whole idea was very clever and nicely implemented with a great Aha! moment. Then in August he completely blew me away with a mostly metal construction called the Naga puzzle which was a sequential discovery puzzle of similar scope and wonder to the limited edition puzzles made by the great Brian Young. A truly amazing thing also is that Carsten spends most of his time living and working aboard a cruise ship travelling all over the world! This gives him very little time at home to actually manufacture his puzzles.

I had communicated with Carsten earlier this year and was aware that he was busily designing away but, to be honest, I had totally forgotten about it. Then out of the blue earlier this month he asked for my address again and sent me another lovely new toy through the post. To make this even more incredible, he has become a father for the first time just a month ago and still managed to work on a fabulous new puzzle! Congratulations my friend! You are amazing! Helping with the development of this puzzle Carsten has discovered the amazing capabilities of 3D printing. The Pirate's casket is made from sintered nylon and has many magnets. It is also one of the first times I have ever come across a puzzle pade with 3D printed metal components too.

The pirate's casket was found after centuries at the bottom of the ocean.....OK it's nylon so maybe it wasn't! But it has been aged to look like it has - apparently judicious use of coffee and charcoal has given it the "bottom of the sea" look. The aim of this puzzle is firstly to find the gold coin inside and then as a secondary challenge I have to establish which pirate it belonged to. YES!!!! I lurve sequential discovery puzzles! I was told that it is strong enough to resist a bit of abuse but banging and prying at it is entirely unnecessary.

The skull ball rotates and can be removed

A keyhole in the bottom

The puzzle is surprisingly weighty for a plastic printed puzzle - it feels like there is metal inside. Maybe it's a gold doubloon? Time to explore....the ball on top rotates freely but has a tendency to ping into certain positions - if you hold a compass near this then the needle goes haywire all over the place! There seems to be magnets involved....LOTS of them! With a bit of a tug the ball will come out too. Underneath the casket there's a keyhole but no key...yet. In fact, looking in the keyhole gives no clue of what's inside as there doesn't seem to be any way for the key to turn inside. It gets more and more intriguing.

The panels rotate

Obviously the next thing to try is look closer at the panels on the faces of the casket. They appear to rotate fairly freely but in 45º increments they click into place. Try this with each in turn and aha! One won't move at all! Explore, explore, explore. My usual is to move things over and over again in the hope that one day I will prove Einstein wrong. Of course that is not the correct thing to do but I do find it therapeutic. OK! Time to be more systematic....rotate each of the panels in turn and see what happens....nothing! Puzzles like this actually require a light touch and during my investigation something feels different and I'm not sure why. Back-track and Aha! again. A panel shifts slightly and seems to require a bit more. What if??? YES!!! I seem to have a key.

A key has come out.

I am told that the key has also been 3D printed! Incredible! I can hear you shouting at me...try it in the keyhole! These damned voices are really starting to worry me!

A perfect fit

The key goes into the keyhole perfectly and..... well you know that NEVER works in the puzzling world. My friend Shane keeps sending me puzzles with keys and so far I don't think any of them have done anything. Puzzle designers are nasty that way - they raise your hopes and dash them.

I give up on the keyhole and notice that the key is held inside fairly firmly. Interestingly there is another magnet stuck inside the key itself. Maybe the key has other uses? I am aware that there are rather a lot of magnets in the casket as floating the key over various parts makes pushing and pulling motions all over the place. I proceed to go round and round in circles for a while and get nowhere. I do make a useful discovery during my further exploration but at this stage it doesn't help me at all. Interestingly moving the key over the ball makes exciting clicking noises and something rather heavy moves around inside it. I have a brainwave which as always doesn't work and give up for the day. After a couple of evenings of attempts my main thought doesn't seem to be working so I contact Carsten for a clue. As a Dad of a new baby, I suspect he doesn't get out very much just now and he replies very quickly. My thoughts had been nearly right and his very teeny tiny hint got me my next step.

The ball can be split

The mechanism is totally ingenious! I love it and I could see why I missed it for so long! Inside the ball is another "thing" to help you on your way but of course it is not quite that straight forward. The interior of the casket is still locked tight. Moving "things" around makes a very tiny change on the outside and this with my earlier finding gives me a bit of a bwainwave. Yet again another very clever mechanism has been implemented and I suddenly find that the locked panel can be moved and then removed:

A revealing movement

A panel comes off and...

I think I am almost there! It has taken me 4 evenings of gentle play and discovery and I finally have found the pirate's coin. I don't think it is a doubloon or even gold but 3D printing makes for a very nice and beautifully detailed momento.

Heads - CE 2016

Tails

Coordinates on the edge

What about the final piece of the quest? Finding out who was the original owner of the casket? This takes good eyesight, some GoogleFu and a bit of reading. I learned there are things you can look up on the internet with only very tiny pieces of information. It would appear that Captain Arthur Catt may have been a very wealthy man before he lost his 3D printed coin and chest in an ocean with coffee in it!

This puzzle has been nearly 2 years in the design and manufacture - it is truly wonderful! Yet again, I am aghast at the incredible skills and design ability of Carsten Elsäßer whilst he spends half his life at sea and also finishing off with a newborn in the house. Thank you so much my friend, I will be bringing this to a Midlands Puzzle Party in the 2018 to let the guys have a play. I am sure that they will solve it quicker than me but will still greatly enjoy it.

Now all that is left for me to do is to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and all the best for the New Year - may it be happy, healthy and puzzling. I hope you all receive what you have been asking for and that next year is truly puzzling for you. I have to quote another friend, Michel,  who always signs his emails and letters with this:

"Let's keep puzzling."

Livewire puzzles part 10 and a little something special

and it begins again!!!

Part 10? How can that be? In February 2012 I posted my final Livewire puzzles post which was number 9 in the series. In the intervening time more than half of those that I considered best in their line up have been discontinued (so now I'm afraid it is up to you to find them on Ebay) but luckily they have also released an extra 5 puzzles.

At the end of last year, I contacted them and managed to buy the 4 that had been released and they told me of their very latest one about to be released for 2014, the Roller Coaster puzzle and offered me the opportunity to buy it early. They arrived in November and after photographing them and realising that all but one was in the "difficult" range, I sort of fiddled and shied away! My excuse was that I had been preoccupied with work and other puzzles.

But, after a few weeks when Mrs S was off visiting her parents and I was alone in the house for a few days, I could play with them and jingle to my heart's content without having to worry about receiving any damage from the laser burning stare and the whiplash 'cat-o-nine tails' tongue! Yes she has been honing her violence skills! I began with the easiest of the 5 new additions - The Ringleader. This one is the only one of the 5 that is on the level 2 page of Livewire puzzles (rated 7/10) and I was reassured by that.

Ringleader

I'm a puzzler on the edge!

The Master Curvy Copter
"HELP! I need someone!!"

Introduction

It has been quite a while since I have posted anything about twisty puzzles and I have recently managed something REALLY special so I thought I would discuss it and also try to give enough information about the process to hopefully entice a few more of you into the wonderful world of twisties! My aim is to talk about edge turning puzzles, a bit about jumbling and then give away "the secret" to twisty success!! Read on!

I started it!

The fearsome looking puzzle pictured at the top is the Master Curvy Copter - it was designed by one of the great twisty puzzle designers, Eitan Cher. It was first announced in June 2010 when Eitan posted about it on the Twisty puzzles - "New puzzles" forum and even though it did not turn very well in version 1, there was a lot of interest in it and then it all quietened down. Subsequently he produced a version 2 which solved all the initial problems and put it up for sale on his Shapeways store where it is now available for a very reasonable €180 in Black. Now mine cost a bit more because I got mine ready made from Eitan (I'm not allowed to dye plastic in my new kitchen on pain of torture!) I chose it because I had absolutely adored (and still do) the original Curvy Copter (pictured left) which I wrote about almost at the beginning of my Twisty puzzling career. I still maintain that it is a fantastic puzzle even for people who are not into twisties. Obviously when you have finished the 3x3 cube then the next step is a 4x4 - so I figured that the step up from the Curvy Copter would be the master version.

This gorgeous puzzle arrived in May this year and I fiddled with it a little and marvelled at how complex it was and yet how well it moved - even the jumbling moves were really easy! I then put it on the shelf next to me where it stayed for a month or so. Yes! it's the "puzzles to be done" shelf and it has quite a few on it! It screamed obscenities at me for weeks but I was far too frightened of it to scramble it and try a solve - partly because I seriously doubted that I had the necessary skills to solve it and also because it is so rare in the wild that no-one has posted anything on-line at all about how to go about solving it - meaning that I would not even be able to look at a tutorial if I got stuck! I believed I was on my own!

Yeah! I can hear you all screaming at me that I'm a puzzle wimp and I freely admit it! Strange that I keep hearing these voices! But..... Just look at it! It's horrendous!

It looks so innocent like this!

So nearly 4 months ago, I finally succumbed and decided to do what I had done with it's daddy (the Curvy Copter) and did a scramble without any jumbling or shapeshifting and did not take any pieces out of their orbits. I recalled when I did the same thing to the Curvy Copter and that I actually managed to solve all but the last corners by intuition alone and then, using some very simple series of moves, I managed to solve them too. I remember how great it felt and what a phenomenal puzzle it was - it ended up as my second ever twisty blog post. If you don't have the Curvy Copter yet, then BUY it.... NOW!

Having done the most basic of scrambles on my new monster,  I set to work and........
I couldn't do it! I spent a week trying everything I could but nope, I didn't have the skills. I couldn't, to my shame, even do the first face. I tried reducing it to a standard curvy copter and failed at that too. So I put it back on the shelf where it looked quite pretty in the scrambled form but every time I looked up it made me feel guilty. I would take it off the shelf and try again every week or two and fail again!