I Need to Think Outside of the Box

Road Blocks

Today's blog post is to show how two of my new puzzles forced me to change my thought processes and got me back to thinking "outside of the box".

I am pleased to say that I have survived the onslaught of the laser burning stare! In fact the present Mrs S did say to me that she had her eye on a particular handbag that she was waiting for the Xmas sale to start before purchasing. She told me the current cost and I gulped internally but didn't break gaze with her for even a second! After this complete lack of a flinch, she nodded internally and it would appear that my recent spending spree is almost forgiven as it hasn't impaired her ability to buy what she desires. She has also been watching me in the evenings and has seen how much fun I have had with them and grudgingly admitted that I seem to have gotten my money's worth. Phew!!! I haven't dared tell her about the next one that I have ordered! Whack! Ouch! Sorry dear.

Cast Galaxy

Cast Galaxy - my goodness it's a tough one to photograph!

Big box from Puzzle Master

This is the first puzzle from my recent Puzzle Master delivery! Yep! I couldn't resist it and just had to get some more wonderful toys to play with and to review! Recently the postman has had quite a bit of extra work and not just because Christmas is coming but because I have had a bit of an ahem.... rush of puzzles to the head! The big box from Puzzle Master will keep me busy for quite a few weeks.

One of the first that I couldn't resist ordering is one that I have "sort" of solved before! I have absolutely no recollection of how I solved it and, until now, have not actually owned a copy myself. The Cast Galaxy was designed by Bram Cohen (yes, the same brilliant man who produced Bit-torrent) and was entered into the IPP Design competition in 2013 where it received a Jury honourable mention (there are quite a lot of prizes in the competition and I really don't understand what they all are for). Shortly after the competition, it was announced that Hanayama had done a deal to have it mass produced as one of their wonderful Cast puzzles. Congratulations Bram! It seemed to take ages after the announcement to reach the market and when it did, it sold out really really quickly and so I had to wait a while to actually obtain a copy.

Asian packaging only

Oddly, it does not seem to have been released with the European/US packaging yet. The version I got was the only Cast puzzle to have come in the Asian packaging (this time a green box) and apart from the name, I have absolutely no idea what the instructions say. I have to assume that it says the same as all the others - that you have to "take it apart and put it back together again". If there are any other aims then I do not know what they are. As you can see from the box it is rated by Hanayama as a level 3 out of 6 and Puzzle Master has rated it as level 7 (Challenging) out of 10 on their own scale. Taking it out of the packaging, you are immediately struck by just how beautiful this puzzle is - it is shiny shiny shiny and because of all the curves and the way it moves it just screams out to be played with!

Revitalised By An MPP!

Bicolor 1365 by Koichi Miura
Purchased from Mine

I've been in a bit of a puzzle slump recently. Too busy and too tired to really play with much. It's only been the constant pressure of the blog that has kept me working on solving stuff and often I find myself leaving it until I have just a day to go before publishing to start playing. I really need to cut down the amount I work. I'm getting too old for it - I discovered yesterday, to my horror, that I am older than Frank, Big Steve and Allard! Damn! I'm old! 😱

That's quite something!

I received a bunch of puzzles from Mine at the beginning of the year and have put them in my file of puzzles to be played with and just left them there. Part of the reason for not playing was the strange warping that happened to the lid of one of the puzzles which occurred between the time they were manufactured and the time they were sent/received. Whenever I looked at it, I just got a disappointed feeling. Mine had apologised to everyone and it is an unfortunate side effect of the use of two different woods side by side. 

Every time I looked at the pile I felt guilty and picked one or two from the Mine delivery up and played a little before failing and putting them back... Until last night and this morning when I had a sudden rush of something to the head!

Yesterday was the 55th MPP (at least that's what LCVX seems to mean even if it is completely invalid Roman Numerals). I managed to work my way through 1 or 2 burrs in the shape of locks and even some in the shape of a tetrahedron and also worked my way through 4 or 5 of the Karakuri Xmas presents which was fun. I really got quite badly stuck on the set of Demonticons and needed quite a lot of assistance. I really must buy them soon. One fun thing to watch was Big Steve and Amy working on the Bicolor 1365 from Mine. It's a brilliant design by Koichi Miura which looks to be deceptively difficult based on the two of them working on it for ages and bickering at each other like an old married couple! The whole group of us got a LOT of entertainment watching them fail for a VERY long time. Needless to say, this motivated me to get my copy out when I got home and whilst watching TV that evening with the present Mrs S, I experimented and saw just how difficult it was.

Instructions

When the lid is placed, the colours will not match

I am not allowed to show the pieces but it is interesting because it consists of a box with a 3x3x2 voxel cavity with a fixed cubic on the base of the box and another fixed on the lid. The pieces completely fill the cavity and consist of 3 full voxel pieces and 4 more made with ½ voxels. It arrives in a solved state but in the "warmup state". I tipped the pieces out and examined them - the split pieces all fit together nicely to make whole ones and obviously I walked right into Koichi-san's trap! I spent the whole evening managing to create quite a few of the 1365 possible assemblies.

Every single time, I managed to fail to create the one single correct assembly that would allow the lid to be placed the correct way around. Finally, it was bed time and I put it down with relief. Sunday morning bright and groggy, I went back to work on it. Doing the same thing over and over again like Steve and Amy eventually got frustrating and I had a little think©. That hurt quite a bit and after recovering from the shock, I had a little fiddle with the split pieces to see how else they could be assembled and how they might then interact with the whole pieces. At some point after a couple of hours there was a really big Aha! moment and I tried something new. It wasn't quite right but I could tell I was nearly there. All I needed to do was fiddle a little bit and yessssss!

Take my word for it - the pieces are inside!
It's still a shame about the warping but the puzzle is great!

Having actually solved something thanks to the MPP, I figured that I should keep going whilst I was on a roll:

Bram's Hinged Cube
3D printed by Allard

The whole world is aware of Bram Cohen for a number of reasons. We all know of him as a brilliant puzzler and designer. Very recently he showed off a new design and allowed the puzzle to be made freely available by releasing the stl files for printing. When I arrived in Birmingham, there were a bunch of these available for grabs and I couldn't resist a lovely lilac copy (maybe Mrs S might like it? Whack! Ouch! That will be a no then.)

As you can see, each cube has a hinge on it attaching it to an adjacent cube and 3 of them are attached to 2 cubes. 2 of the cubes have a "blocker" on them which will interfere with adjacent hinges. The aim is to manipulate the hinges to assemble a 2x2x2 cube in such a way that the blockers don't clash. The rotation of the chains of cubies cause them to interfere with each other and there should be no force involved. This looked so good that I picked up another couple of copies to give away to colleagues at work. 

Two more copies to give away.
Notice that there're quite a few flat shapes to be made.

Playing with this is fascinating and reminiscent of the old Rubik's snake. It gets blocked very quickly and the temptation is to force pieces to move past each other. Resist that temptation as you don't want to pop a hinge. It is a fun thing to play with - several times I created a 2x2x2 cube with just one cube out of place and, after a good hour, I got an almost there solution but we all know that "almost" is not solved.

Blocked from achieving the solution

Finally after a couple of hours I had an Aha! moment and could see the correct cube assembly but getting the pieces into place was a big challenge. It required me to undo almost the whole thing to move pieces out of the way before trying again in a different order:

Bram is a genius!
Thanks to Allard for making me a copy.

Undoing it is also a bit of a challenge - I could not for the life of me work out how to return to the starting flat shape. To my shame it took me a good 20 minutes! And now I can't repeat the solve which means I didn't understand it at all - time to keep 

I even managed to solve an easier puzzle that Allard gave away:

Stella Octangular Puzzle

I couldn't resist this - straight away I realised that this was a version of the Triangular star puzzle. In fact, as far as I can tell it is identical and creates a very pleasing shape when assembled

Very pleasing - Just pull opposite vertices to disassemble

I am now busy working on a copy of Stewart Coffin's Diamonds puzzle (STC #269) which looks fairly simple but so far the full assembly has eluded me:

Diamonds (STC #269) printed by Allard

As you can see, attending an MPP has revitalised my puzzling - it's not an entirely solitary pastime this. Playing with friends and watching others struggle is very good for the motivation.

Don't tell Mrs S but I might have acquired a new lock whilst there. Andrew Coles is about to release a new lock to the world. The Clutch Lock is beautifully made and so far, I have done one thing and discovered why it has that name. It might be years before I make the next discovery!

Clutch Lock by AC puzzles

Looking forward to the next MPP in May - it may be the next time I solve anything! 😱

Cast Cake

No Fiddling! It's Time to Think©

Hanayama Cast Cake

Last weekend I blogged about 2 of the latest Hanayama cast puzzles which have yet to be generally available outside of Japan. I am sure they will be available from all the usual puzzle suppliers soon. I began my odyssey with the easiest of them (a level 1), the Cast Diamond and decided that it was a fun little puzzle with little challenge for the experienced puzzler but a really nice one to give to friends to watch them attempt. Then I moved on to the hardest of them (level 6 out of 6), the Cast Infinity which I actually found relatively easy but I have been told by other puzzlers that it actually isn't as easy as I think it is and many people may find it a reasonable challenge.

I had seen on Facebook that quite a few puzzlers had really struggled with the supposedly easier challenge of the Cast Cake. The Cake is rated as a level 4 on Hanayama's 6 point scale putting it at the same difficulty level as the Cast Möbius which Mike reviewed for me here. He was not very impressed with it and rated it much easier than a 4 (as would I) and it certainly would not be in the same league as others rated as level 4 like the Cast Marble, Cast Radix, Cast Donuts and others. All of those have been reviewed by me (Marble, Radix, Donuts) and I have thoroughly enjoyed them but consistently thought of them as considerably harder than the level 4 they had been given. I have to say that the Cast Cake also should be rated as a level 5 or maybe 5½. This puzzle was designed by the incredibly talented Bram Cohen who is responsible for quite a few puzzles in my collection, many of which are incredibly challenging.

Thought Outside the Box and.....Failed! So....

....thought back in it again!

Triagonal Agony

First new post of the year and this is a brilliant puzzle that really kept me going - proving that I am not terribly bright!

Back in November I had a little epiphany about packing puzzles....I needed to start thinking outside the box. One of the most important triggers for this was a brilliant puzzle that I bought from Eric Fuller - the One Hole designed by Bram Cohen. But even before this I had a trial run when Brian Menold sold me a beautiful copy of the L-I-Vator cube designed by Laszlo Molnar (apparently who is also known as Lacika Kmolnar). The L-I-Vator taught me that there were quite a few steps to be done between assembly of the basic shape outside of the box and the actual packing it in. The requirement for rotations of more than one of the pieces made it a really fun challenge and I loved it. It was not hugely difficult but certainly had a couple of brilliant A-ha! moments.

When Brian announced that he was producing another of Laszlo's creations, the Triagonal Agony, I promised myself that I would jump as soon as the went up for sale. I was actually on-line at the moment that Brian made his announcement that they were up for sale and quickly added my preferred one to my shopping cart along with another beauty (the Tropical Fish). There is an odd quirk of the shopping cart that Brian uses that allows puzzles already in someone's cart to be snatched out by someone else buying before the original purchaser gets to the checkout. This has happened to me several times over the years and Brian always tries to make good on it if you ask him about it. Apparently it was my turn to do the snatching! Hooray! I got there first! I ripped the copy out of someone else's cart when I paid. A day or so later Brian emailed me to ask whether I would agree to let that one go and he would make me another copy using the same woods as my L-I-Vator cube. Well I hate to disappoint anyone and I trust Brian implicitly so of course I agreed and a few weeks later I received my new toys with the Triagonal Agony being made out of Holly and Marblewood to match my other puzzle.

MORE toys!!!!

More, More, MORE ....

I really have a serious problem!! My name is Kevin and I am a puzzleholic....

Hanayama Cast Marble

Cast Marble

Outer Shell Moves

Time to review yet another one of from my large Puzzle Master hoard - this time it is the Hanayama Cast Marble. In fact I have actually played with it before - when I met with a puzzle friend who owned it and also a friend at work brought it in to show me. Each time I had only really played with it for a short while. Over the last year or so, I have heard many people rave about this one, both about it's looks and it's very sweet puzzle action. Quite a few people claim that this one is their absolute favourite Hanayama cast puzzle. So eventually I had to break down and get one for myself!

Moises (our favourite puzzle rookie) has reviewed it here, Neil expressed his opinion here (he said it was his second favourite), Oli also really enjoyed it (his review is here), Brian's review is on his site and Gabriel's review is here. All these positive reviews are despite it being a relatively easy puzzle to solve - Hanayama rate it as a 4 out of 6 and Puzzle Master put it at 8 on their scale of 5 to 10 (Demanding) - I think this rating is about right. This means that it is not the difficulty that causes the enjoyment, there must be something else special about it.

It arrived in the usual delightful Hanayama packaging and when you take it out of the box the only thing you can say is that it is absolutely gorgeous! It consists of a cuboid 3.6 x 3.6 x 2.5cm in size and feels quite substantial in your hand. Within the cuboid is a marble with cuts in it in the same configuration as the parts of a tennis ball (fitting! Seeing as it is now Wimbledon final week). No solution is provided, but if you really need one then you can download it from here. The Marble spins freely within the cuboid (although the 2 halves of the marble will not move relative to one another). The cuboid, on the other hand is obviously made of 2 parts (it could even be mistaken for 4) which move freely too but not enough to release the marble. It is made from a chromed metal in 2 colours with the block being a blackened shade. The only downfall (as you can see from my photos is that it picks up fingerprints immediately!) It was originally designed jointly by Oskar ven Deventer and Bram Cohen and produced initially by George Miller before Hanayama obtained permission to mass produce it. Puzzle Master sell it for $13.

Packing puzzle heaven - The Breadbox Puzzle

Breadbox from David Litwin

So over the last few weeks I have regaled you with tales of woe! Complaining about how terrible I am at packing puzzles and am determined to try and improve my skills. At the end of January, I saw this post from Gabriel describing this particular puzzle and how much he enjoyed the challenge but still found it solvable (although he is much better than me at packing puzzles). As soon as I saw the pictures I knew I had to have one for myself.

• It is made of wood - check!
• It is beautifully made - check!
• It looks absolutely gorgeous - check!
• It's a packing puzzle and it might be do-able by a human (or me!) - check!
• I therefore had to have one!

Eric Makes a Burr and a Maze and a Packing Puzzle in One

Packira

It has been a while since I reviewed a burr made by Eric Fuller so I will redress that now! I bought the Packira back in November when Eric wrote that this was his favourite puzzle from the previous update. He looks at so many designs that I just had to take his opinion seriously! Plus of course, this is made from 2 of my favourite woods, Wenge and Bubinga. On top of all that it is designed by the amazing Tamás Vanyó!

Another unusual Vanyó design

I have been friends with Tamás on Facebook for a few years now and every week he produces several new designs to amaze us - he is an absolute master of Burrtools and seems to specialise in unusual shapes or unusual movements in his puzzles. He even makes them himself for sale locally in Hungary or to give as gifts to his friends (one day I hope to buy directly from him). Recently I wrote about his Covalent puzzle which was produced by Pelikan which unfortunately is now sold out. The combination of Eric's workmanship and recommendation, Tamás' unusual design ideas and these lovely woods meant that I just couldn't resist this one. After it arrived, I got rather sidetracked by the other puzzle I bought at that time - the One Hole by Bram Cohen which I reviewed here. After that the Packira sat in my work bag for ages almost forgotten.

Hanayama Cast Rattle

Cast Rattle

My recent batch of puzzles from Puzzle Master included the Hanayama Cast Rattle, one of the most recent from the very prolific puzzle producing company. This puzzle was designed by Bram Cohen and is rated as 8 out of 10 (Demanding) by Puzzle Master and 4 (out of 6) by Hanayama. I therefore expected this to be a fairly significant challenge this time.

As usual, it is well packaged and the instructions just say to separate the four pieces which make it up. No solution is provided and I think that one is not really needed - most people should be able to work this out eventually. If you do want a solution then you can download one from here. It consists of four pieces each identically shaped that are loosely interlocked together (dimensions when assembled are 40x38x26mm). Being so loose they all can shake about freely (but not fall apart) hence the name - Rattle. The pieces are made from a really lovely shiny chromed metal and the puzzle is fairly substantial weight. It does look at first glance that these should just unlock from each other pretty easily - BUT looks can be deceiving.

Let's take it up a gear!

During my last twisty puzzle review I mentioned that there was more to talk about when it comes to cubes and here I am again with yet another of those damn twisty puzzle reviews! When Ernö Rubik first developed his (and our) beloved cube puzzle he would not have believed how much variety there was to come!

Gear cube

The gear cube caught my eye whilst surfing around some of the twisty puzzle YouTube nuts. I saw an unboxing from Kenneth (aka RedKB) and thought that this was a totally awesome (excuse the Americanism!) idea. It was designed originally by Oskar van Deventer (I have got to meet this man someday) who called it the caution cube after getting his finger caught in the gears (the original Shapeways version had very sharp edges!)

Other bloggers have also reviewed it - Gabriel was first with his review, followed by Brian and much more recently Oli has just started his trek into twisty madness and reviewed it here (He is nowhere near as crazy about the twisties as I have become!!)

This puzzle looks horrifically complex because when you turn one face the centre face turns with it. For every half turn of a face the centre turns 90º. At the same time as doing this the middle cubies rotate around so it very quickly gets to look rather scrambled and sort of shape-shifted. To see this amazing cube in action have a look at this video by by larfrtc: