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.

Happy New Year! My top ten(ish) puzzles of 2025

Happy New Year to all you crazy people out there who also are hooked on puzzles! 2025 has been an odd year for me. I should have had more time for puzzling due to dropping some clinical work but the admin/committee work I picked up in its place seemed to have taken up just as much, if not more time and I seem to have had less time for puzzling and oddly even bought less puzzles than previous years. The puzzles that I did manage to get were very high quality and also rather difficult. Quite a few were so difficult that I haven't managed to solve them yet which means they cannot technically be included in my top ten(ish) puzzles.

Of course, I do have to show them off as top puzzles obtained but not completed.

Not Solved Yet

The Twins box alongside its predecessor, the Angel Box

The Twins box has been discussed for several years. Wil has had it in his head to create for many years but sourcing the parts has proven very difficult. This year, it finally reached fruition and was made available to owners of the Angel box with matching serial numbers. Mine arrived damaged thanks to UK customs and also the first step had been opened. I took it to the last MPP for Ali to reset and have been fiddling with it for a while. It is bloody heavy and hard work to play with. I suspect this will take me a very long time.

Jukebox from MoonTree puzzles

The Jukebox won the Jury grand prize in the 2024 IPP. I was staggered when it was going to be produced in significant numbers but put my name down straight away. After months of waiting and lots of updates showing progress, it arrived in July. I have admired it, and put it on display but had no time at all to play with it. I am sure it will end up in my top ten when I get to play.

Gordian Knot

The Gordian knot by Robert Yarger has been a holy grail puzzle for me for years now. I was so pleased when it was made available in a cast resin from Lewis Evans. I have gotten lost with this recently and put it down for a while. Unfortunately one of the metal plaques stuck on it has come off but once I've worked out where it came from I can stick it back on. It is a beautifully made creation and has fulfilled a long time wish of mine! 

Clutch Lock from Andrew Coles

I bought the Clutch Lock at an MPP in March. It is a beautifully made heavy creation and like many lock puzzles, I have absolutely no idea what I am doing! I managed to unlock the shackle and now have a lock that I can open and close but cannot remove the key from the keyway any more. I have picked this up regularly throughout the year and have no clue what to try next. This might take me a decade!

OPUP from Dan Shane

One piece packing took me a while

I have to admit to being slightly biased...I do tend to prefer puzzles made from beautiful wood or meticulously made from metal. It is unusual for me to really love a plastic puzzle but the OPUP from Dan Shane really caught my attention. It really shouldn't be that hard but it is and I managed to trigger the packing but despite weeks of trying have completely failed in the unpacking challenge. There's one obvious step and that's as far as I have got! Bugger! One piece in a box and a cable - how hard can it be?

The original one piece packing puzzle from Eric Fuller took me a very long time so I expect that the unpacking puzzle might take me just as long!

Iteration 23

Crawl Space

Dead Mortimer

Pinhead

Over this year I received several sequential discovery boxes from Dee Dixon and haven't managed to solve any of them. NOT a single one! I am rubbish at puzzles!

Finally we actually reach my top ten(ish) puzzles of 2025 and here we mean the puzzles that I have actually managed to solve. In retrospect it has been a rather good year for collecting and puzzle quality!

Almost Top Ten

Tetra claws by Derek Bosch

Hardly a year goes by without an entry from the genius that is Derek Bosch. His awesome brain seems to work in more dimensions than the rest of us creating interesting geometric shapes and here he managed to create some N-ary puzzles with pieces that have an odd mind-bending way of interacting with each other. I adored these and for the tougher ones in the series had to take notes on how the sequences went.

Horns of Booth

Petit Albert

Dr Volker Latussek has designed and produced with the help of Jakub's Pelikan team, a LOT of fabulous challenges. They are all stunning of course and amazing challenges but two particularly stood out to me in the sheer elegance of their solutions. They were wonderful and the fact that they are in my almost their list shows just how good a year we had for puzzles. Thank you Volker and Jakub.

10 - Interlocking puzzles from Juno

Juno's Euroka 10x3 remained in pieces for 2 years before I finally managed to assemble it - the shout reverberated around the house and upset Mrs S but she did end up pleased that I didn't have a pile of pieces lying around any more.

Tornado burr

At the beginning of the year Juno also released this amazing and fun version of the Tornado burr which required a LOT of courage to dismantle and a lot of fun - it's a masterpiece!

9 - Safe by Pelikan

Safe from Pelikan

Every year Pelikan produce something large and fabulous. This year I was able to get a copy of the Safe. It's beautifully made with a really nice mechanism. It has a fun little story to it and best of all, it looks great on display. Thank you Jakub, for another brilliant challenge!

8 - Who Dares Wins by Shane and the Two Brass Monkeys

Damn! This took me a long time

When the lock brain of Shane gets together with the manufacturing expertise of Steve and Ali, you know you are in for a fun time. Those buggers kept me frustrated for 8 bloody months! Eventually I had to be brave and do the unthinkable and of course, it worked. Absolutely astounding puzzle which takes pride of place alongside all my other Hales puzzles. Thanks guys!

7 - Ages by Brian Young

It lived up to its name!

Hell! This one is almost embarrassing. Brian named it Ages after how long Burrtools said it would take to find the solution. Indeed, it took me AGES! Nearly 6 years. The Aha! moment was amazing but even after that point there was a tremendously difficult burr to solve that included a rotational move and then a sequential discovery element to release the small piece of Opal inside. I was so relieved to finally beat it but I cannot bring myself to put it away yet as I keep picking it up to fiddle with the interesting mechanisms. Thank you Brian.

6 - Keeboxes

All four Keeboxes bought together

Having been shown these at an MPP and forgotten about them until the next MPP, I finally got around to purchasing the whole set at once. Much to the disgust of Mrs S who is not keen on chunks of plastic lying around the house (she barely tolerates the beautiful wood). However, the puzzling involved in these amazing sequential discovery creations is truly fabulous. They get progressively more difficult until the last one, yellow, which is level 4 out of 5 and took me many hours of failure before I got there. They have not made a version which is level 5 yet but the thought frightens me a lot. I keep looking at their Etsy store in the hope that there will be another one.

5 - Locks by Boaz

Loophole

Ant Hunt

When Boaz produces something we all sit up and pay attention. These arrived in 2024 but took me many months to solve. They are beautifully logical and magnificently well made. This reminds me that he has produced a new one recently and I haven't bought it yet. I will need to remedy that when my bank account fills back up.

4 - OMG! Minima's, So Many Minima's

Minima's 1 to 8

Minima's 9 to 12

When Frederic Boucher designs something we are all interested. The fact that Tye Stahly and Jakub manufacture these puzzles is just confirmation of how good they are. The Minima set appeared in my top ten last year but they were beautifully recreated by Pelikan this year and everything is improved by wood. Also having boxes that you can't see through makes them even more challenging.

But that wasn't all...

Minima Texas

Minima Duo - Tye's IPP exchange puzzle

Then addition of a ball to the challenge makes things even more interesting with Minima Smiley in two guises :

There were even more but I have to stop or I will never manage to finish this post!

3 - Popplock T14

Quite possibly the best one yet? 

Rainer produces something special every year or two. They are ferociously expensive but you can see and feel the quality. There are a few over the years that I have not managed to solve but this one led me on a nice path from the very beginning. It was absolutely wonderful with a sequence of mechanisms that I have never seen before and would actually not have thought possible. Absolutely amazing!

2 - Moonage M5 by Stephan

Moonage M5 by Stephan Baumegger

This incredible creation from Stephan was one of the top 10 voter getters by the IPP attendees in 2024. It looked stunning and having won such admiration, I couldn't resist getting a copy. I wasn't disappointed - it looks amazing and has a whole series of Aha! moments that lead you to the end goal of creating the lunar landing scene. Just fabulous and only just beaten out of the number one spot.

1 - Tortoise Protocol by Juno

Tortoise Protocol

Having missed out on the award winning Hippo last year (funds were low), I made sure that I had enough available for the next Junichi Yananose sequential discovery puzzle. This one is beautiful and packs a series of unbelievable challenges into the solve process. It made me do unspeakably awful things to a tortoise but the end result was fabulous. Even the reset had a little trap to it. Juno is an absolute master of design and woodwork. Thank you, my friend!

There are still an embarrassingly large number of puzzles that I have bought this year and previous years that remain unsolved. To name a few...The Crazy Double Circle Cube frightens me to death and I have left it alone for the whole year! The Box of Celts remains locked at step one! Sigh! A big bunch of wire puzzles from Aaron seem to be impossible for me but I keep trying!

Do you agree with my top 10? If you have any different thoughts then please comment below or even use my Contact page to tell me how wrong I am. I look forward to your thoughts. 

Happy New Year to you all!

I really hope that you all have a fabulous year in 2026 with good health, success and plenty of wonderful puzzling. I look forward to entertaining and maybe helping many of you in this year. 

What A Mammoth N-ary Effort!

Brass side

Steel side with monkey

The Blind Panic puzzle was Ali's IPP exchange. I received a copy at the MPP

It ooks and feels wonderful and is effectively a Panex (with one difference discussed later).

First of all, a little note to inform you that the OPUP remains packed and the Dovetail bar 2 remains a single piece! maybe I need another hobby?

I am having to work this weekend yet again and so only have a quick update on last week's challenge. I do maintain that I definitely am an eejit! I decided to finally work on the two puzzles that I own that are effectively Panex puzzles. I had thought for a while that the Panex was a "simple" N-ary puzzle and it "just" needed me to work out the pattern and then slog through.

Damn! That wasn't very bright! I should have realised that any so called N-ary puzzle that is more complex than the basic Chinese rings is not necessarily going to be straightforward. The clue should have come from the incredible puzzles sent to me by Aaron Wang over the years. I don't buy everything he has to sell because a. I can't really afford to buy them all and 2. some of them look impossible for human beings to solve! However, I have bought quite a few of his fancy N-ary designs and have solved very very few of them! Even the ones that are "just" N-ary have some very complex sequences that I often seem to get lost in and most of them remain unsolved and in my pile of puzzles reminding me of how rubbish I am at puzzling and, more importantly and dangerously, they are annoying Mrs S and tempting the cats into string swallowing. 😱

Street Lamp

Golden Gate Bridge

Both of these were bought last summer and both have ended up with me completely stuck.Thank heavens for the quick reset that Aaron installed. This should remind the unwary puzzler that many N-ary puzzles have rather a lot more to them than one might expect.

The Bell
Unsolved for several years!

How does that relate to the Panex? Well, I am not certain but I think the Panex is sort of N-ary but with patterns within patterns and the challenge is to find an approach in stages. It is not a simple thing to do and took me a week to complete a level 5 version. The Bell from Siebenstein Spiele is a very similar puzzle but has the advantage that the 3rd column is visible. I decided to solve the two puzzles in stages side by side. I started on the level 3 solve. It is trivial to move 3 disks from one arm to the empty arm like a Tower of Hanoi puzzle and then move the ano0ther one to where they came from:

⅔ of the way

Done it!

This was done fairly trivially on the Bell and then also on the Blind Panic. Success! I think must have taken me about 60 moves. Time to move to level 4 and OMG! it was not trivial. It can no longer be solved by using simple Tower of Hanoi sequences.

The first sequence is Tower of Hanoi and transfers one arm to the gap

It looks as if being able to do the sequence above is possible then all that is required is to do it again with the dark set of disks. But and it's an enormous BUT the way the Bell and Panex is constructed requires to use the top pathway as temporary storage as the disks are slid from one leg to the other. The problem when attempting a level 4 is that having moved the first sequence across to the middle leg the temporary storage that would be used is above that middle leg and it subsequently blocks movement of disks across the top to the other leg. It took me absolutely ages to realise that the Tower of Hanoi approach is impossible with this puzzle. The interesting thing with Ali's Blind Panic is that the path at the top of the puzzle is circular and also that the temporary storage is above the pile of pieces in an arm and not in the top path! 

This end result of this is that the two puzzles are not actually the same. They are almost equivalent but the crucial difference makes the Blind Panic much more approachable and more like a multi-layer  Hanoi puzzle. After a couple of days of play I solved the level 4 on the Bell and convinced myself I had a reasonable approach. A level 4 Panex should take 174 moves - I must have been several times that many:

Level 4 solved - this almost killed me!

Time to strat on the level 5 Bell and simultaneously solve the Blind Panic. It was more of the same but to me did not feel very logical. It took me a lot of back and forth, getting it wrong and starting again. I did the Blind Panic at the same time. My hands were rather sore but the end of another few days of work:

Level 5 solved!

Brass above the monkey

Apparently the level 5 Panex takes 461 moves as a minimum to solve but for me it must have been thousands and thousands as I made mistakes and had to backtrack or got lost and had to start sections again. I was mentally and physically exhausted after doing that and despite being elated, I have absolutely no plan to undo it and go back to the beginning using the same approach - I think it would kill me! The Bell puzzle can be unscrewed and this is exactly what I will be doing! Then there is the thought of completing the entire Bell puzzle (level 6) - OMG! NO! It should take a minimum of 1170 moves but I suspect it would be 10's of thousands for me and most of the rest of my remaining hair and my life! I'm afraid that the final solution to the Bell will never happen.

There has been quite a lot of mathematical analysis on the minimum number of moves that are required to solve the Panex puzzle and I don't really understand any of it. I do know that it is a LOT more moves than you would expect and the logic is really not obvious! Have a look at the papers linked from Nick Baxter's site - I did and it didn't help me much at all! 🤣

What about resetting the Blind Panic puzzle? There is a screw on top which I suspect can be undone and the puzzle pieces removed and replaced back in the start position. BUT, I am fairly convinced that that a simple Tower of Hanoi approach is possible for this puzzle because of the circular top pathway and the extra storage position in the top of each column. I am going to work on that for the next day or so and will report back to you next week!

Wish me luck!