I was absolutely delighted to chat with Yavuz again in Italy in June. He is such
a delight to talk to - about puzzles, about business, about family... he's
absolutely wonderful and, as I have
said before, very very talented both as a designer and as a craftsman. His
Step by Step was the very winner of a very well deserved
Honourable mention award
from the Design Competition jury and it also received one of my 5 votes as well.
It is an incredible piece of puzzle design and amazing woodworking technique to
manufacture something so complex in its movement. I spent quite a lot of time on
it during the IPP and actually managed to solve it. I suspect it did not
win an award from the puzzlers because it is really quite a complex difficult
solve.
Cube dropped out of the frame
When it came to time to buy Yavuz' puzzles, I had already spent most of my
free cash and had to decide whether I purchase the Step by Step which I had
solved or go for another new challenge. In the end I decided on a new
attractive puzzle which Yavuz had released earlier in the year. I went for the
Kubro which is a mixture of Oak, Wenge with steel posts and acrylic framing.
It was packaged in the solved state and Yavuz suggested that I undo the top
mirror screws to release the upper acrylic plate and drop out the pieces.
Having done that I scrambled the pieces and set to trying to put them back in
the reassembled frame. Oh boy - This is not for the faint of heart! Creating
the 3x3x3 cube outside the frame is not terribly difficult and Burrtools tells
me that there is only one assembly. This means that you will have 6
orientations to try to place them in the frame.
Initially I thought that it might require sliding pieces in from the sides but
realised that the genius of Yavuz has made that impossible because the cube is
3x3x3 but the middle layer of the frame is at the halfway point. This means
that pieces can poke through it but not actually enter or exit that route.
Only the top hole can be the entry and this is restricted. Interestingly, it's
not restricted by much with only 1 voxels covered at two diagonally opposite
corners. I initially thought this might be relatively simple - I always try
and solve these in reverse by making the shape and working out how to take it
out of the frame by moving the pieces around next to the frame but outside of
it. With this puzzle, I found the way the frame blocked at the half-way point
made it very difficult for me to visualise the interaction. Several
orientations of the cube could be discarded very easily but there was one that
had me absolutely convinced I had found the correct orientation. I was
completely fixated on it but at the last 2 piecesI just could not place them.
To my huge embarrassment, I got stuck here for ages and even contemplated
rotational moves. After a day or so I slapped myself and told my self that
Yavuz would never do such a blasphemous thing! I was forced to try an
alternative. I did eventually find an interesting sequence that should work. I
was able to do it outside the frame and carefully placed the pieces in the
right orientation and order to keep my memory working. When it came to
repeating it in the frame, it is quite fiddly because the pieces at times are
widely separated from each other and the frame tends to tip them over inside -
this requires a bit of dexterity to control. I watched in awe as the pieces
were forced to dance around each other a couple of times before every piece
was inserted. A very excited shout of success from me made the cats actually
look up from their resting positions. Picture of the solved puzzle behind a
spoiler button:
My goodness - that is very clever!
Whilst I am ever so slightly wistful that I didn't go home with the Step by
Step which is a masterpiece of design and woodwork, I am very pleased that I
went with Kubro as it will look fabulous on display and was a very fun solve
which took me an embarrassingly long time to solve.
Squary Pack 1
Yavuz kindly also insisted on giving me a gift to go home with me - he handed me a small box with one of his earlier packing puzzles - this one is Squary pack 1. The aim being to put the 4 square pieces inside the 2 layer square box. There's a big hole to place them through! Should be easy? Yeah! Maybe not. It's easy to put 3 pieces inside but they then block any 4th piece you try.
I always got stuck in this sort of scenario
This is quite a diminutive puzzle and very fun to play with. I kept doing the same thing over and over again and then trying it in different directions to no avail. Eventually I had wonderful aha! moment and got the 4th piece placed inside. Where Kubro is probably too difficult for a casual puzzler, this is perfect to torture your friends with or to take to work - I plan on doing this very soon. Squary pack 1 is the first in a huge series of similar packing puzzles which look incredibly fun. The full set can be seen here. I probably need to get the rest of them some time if I can sneak them pasty Mrs S.
If you want to buy Yavuz' designs then there are a lot of his puzzles made by
himself as well as PuzzleMaster on the
PuzzleMaster site. If you want to buy from him direct then you can contact him by email (contact me if you want his address) or via Instagram (yd_puzzles).
No comments:
Post a Comment