So Tough I May Just be Bones When It Is Reassembled

PuzzleMaster and Jerry Loo's Skull

This blog post was produced a day earlier and in a hurry because I am working the weekend yet again - the solution to this one nearly killed me and I have not even attempted to reassemble it yet! It may remain in pieces for the rest of time which is unfortunate because Mrs S actually likes the look of it.

This fabulous creation which has been mass-produced thanks to PuzzleMaster's use of a Kickstarter campaign is now available for everyone to try out but you should all be warned... the level 10 is very well deserved! This is a seriously complex and difficult puzzle. 

It had originally been designed by Jerry back in 2019 in a simpler form called Cranium which was iterated over a period of time until it reached the current (considerably harder) form. Later that year, one of the earlier versions was produced by Eric Fuller in a very limited edition (this one had 26 pieces and was called the Berro-skull). As it got more and more complex, it was only ever made by 3D printing and never in any significant numbers. Jerry has been known to produce small batches of stainless steel puzzles, one of which I reviewed (along with the PuzzleMaster anodised aluminium version) here. He did attempt to produce the 67 piece skull in steel himself but could not find a way to do it himself and his local fabricator could not work with such tiny pieces. Luckily for us all, Leon Stein (owner of PuzzleMaster) decided to spend the time and effort working with Jerry to get this produced and functional. The end result is stunning!

I backed the Kickstarter campaign but it is now also available as part of the PuzzleMaster own brand metal puzzle collection at a very reasonable price of $144CAD. Believe me, for a puzzle of this complexity with this many well-finished parts in any material, this is a very good deal. In stainless steel this is bordering on unbelievable! You could say it is a steelsteal. It is a substantial item at 7 x 6 x 5.1cm and weighing in at 800g. Mrs S straight away told me in no uncertain terms that it was not allowed anywhere near the kitchen work surface or floor tiles - if I break any of them then she would break me! For heaven's sake, don't show her the picture at the top of this blog post!

I was again too frightened to start on this for a very long time but eventually screwed my courage to the sticking point and had a fiddle. Much to Mrs S' amusement, there was no progress for an embarassingly long time. I was able to find that the wooden mouth shape was easily removable and also found another move of a single piece but nothing would slide off/out. Bugger! I think it must have taken me another 4 or 5 days before the next move became apparent to me much to my relief. This wasn't because of any flaw in the deign or manufacture - I was just rubbish and did not attempt the correct move for a long time. Having found that next move, pieces started to be removable...lots of them and I got "the fear". I quickly backtracked and put it back together again and left it for a while. Several days later, having found some more courage (I seem to recall that gin helped), I did it again and went a bit further by removing about 10 pieces. This was fun! Great fun! Then I tried to backtrack and had a pair of pieces that I could not replace - I am blaming the gin but you may think it was me being a simpleton. I was able to put it back together with that pair of pieces left outside the puzzle and after a bit of a panic, I could work out from the holes left where they went and reassembled it properly. 

That experience frightened me quite a lot and I left it alone for several weeks until my workload meant that I had to find something to solve soon or there would be no blog post this week. Once my fear of no blog post and exceeded my fear of the puzzle, I started again and decided that the best thing to do was to lay all the pieces out as I removed them and backtrack regularly during the disassembly. Of course, once I was about 10-12 pieces in, I was unable to return to the beginning and there was a huge flurry of effing and blinding as I desperately tried to work it out. Yes, I scared the crap out of myself again and decided I would take a few videos of the dismantling so that I might possibly stand some chance of reassemble. The video had to be taken over several attempts due to the need to feed a very loud Burmese cat, having to deal with Mrs S making very disparaging comments about my prowess and due to my general incompetence. I got stuck on the disassembly on numerous occasions and on several occasions had to desperately try and work out where some random piece of metal had come from after it fell out from inside with me having no clue of the original position. When I looked back at the videos to try and see where these pieces had come from, I realised that quite a bit of the recording was 1. out of focus, 2. out of site of the camera and 3. not helpful with my mystery pieces.

After about 4 hours of swearing and being laughed at I could take a photo - this is the pieces carefully arranged in a rough order that they came out in 3 batches - believe me, this is NOT a spoiler!

This may be how it stays forever more!

I have wrapped the pieces up in the white pillowcase that I have used to provide contrast for the photo to try and prevent the curious cat rearranging the order or even running off with any pieces. I hope that I can one day reassemble it - I am desperately looking at my rubbish videos to see what I can do. The review left on the PM site from Tyler (a well known puzzler and friend) states that if you take your time about the disassembly then you should manage to put it back together. I tried to do that but at some point lost track and just proceeded anyway. I think that I might be in trouble - wish me luck! There are hundreds of solutions on the PM site here but predictably this one is not amongst them - GULP!

Am I Playing A Dirty Trick On You?

Dirty Dozen by Jerry Loo

Just got a little time for a quick review today. As the second wave takes hold I am finding less and less time to play - there is a lot of work to be done as we try to get the urgent cases done (trauma, limb or mobility threatening surgery and cancer surgery) alongside the increasing burden of Covid work. During the first wave the NHS' response was to empty the hospitals of nearly everything except the most sick, urgent or infected but now we are desperately trying to keep other stuff going at the same time - I know that my hospitals are absolutely full with over 1500 beds being used at 105% capacity. Things are made all the harder with up to 10% of our workforce either off sick or isolating forcing the remainder to try and fill in the gaps. This is meaning unexpected changes of duties/days of work and often very long days. Morale is surprisingly good, considering but fatigue is definitely setting in. Please please stay safe, stay home, stay in your home/family bubbles and try to slow the spread to prevent hospitals being overwhelmed - plus the added bonus for you of not getting sick.

After that diatribe, back to the puzzle - I can read your minds...I know that you are thinking "I'm sure he's written about this puzzle before" and you are completely wrong...alright partially wrong. I personally have never written about this puzzle but it has appeared on this blog in the form of a guest post by the incredibly talented and prolific PuzzleMad foreign correspondent, Mike Desilets. I had bought the original stainless steel version direct from Jerry and had been very happy with it and solved it with difficulty way back in July 2018. For some reason I never got around to writing about it and then Mike managed a full analysis in his great article. Way back in May, I couldn't resist buying a whole bunch of PuzzleMaster's new range of anodised metal puzzles and a nice bunch of them arrived just as I had to go back onto the on call rota. This meant that I never got around to solving or writing about any after the first one, the Chiasma by Yavuz Demirrhan. So, in desperation this morning, I went to my pile of unsolved puzzles and couldn't resist this - it is VERY shiny and VERY gorgeous! This new series from PuzzleMaster is extremely high quality and extremely well presented:

Nice box!

Very well held in foam

The puzzle is an extremely bright orange and the anodisation is stunning - it is a very tactile thing that is wonderful to fiddle with. It deforms a lot as you play but will not fall apart. 

A LOT of movement in it

Ordinarily a board burr with this number of pieces would be a truly fearsome thing to attempt to dismantle but in a way it is not a normal burr. I spent a while playing with it before realising that this was not a simple sequence of moves that would allow disassembly. It was more like a lock where a particular configuration needed to be found before pieces could be removed. In fact, I managed the disassembly in a similar manner to picking a lock - moving pieces into certain shapes with tension (provided by gravity) until something clicked and a piece had engaged partially and then doing it again in another direction until it happened again. 

When picking a lock, it can take quite a few movements before the pins sequentially are all released and sometimes they need to be restarted and done in a different order. A very similar approach is required with this puzzle. I needed quite a few attempts before a piece was removed. Repeating this process in multiple directions and orientations allowed me, over a period of about a ½ hour, to sequentially create a pile of bright orange metal:

Yay! It's not actually that tough once you have worked out a technique!

Having done that, the challenge is obviously to leave a pile of metal with instructions to the wife to put it back together again and put it back in the box........ Whack! Ouch! No, of course she was not going to go along with that plan and she was not going to allow me to leave the pieces lying around for days/weeks/months until I could reassemble them. She has begun to threaten throwing things away if they are not placed out of the way tidily. Oh the stress! Now, when I disassembled the puzzle, I did it in a very haphazard way without really learning the order, orientation or position of each of the pieces as they were removed. I did sort of try to do my usual "back and forth" technique as I do with most other burrs but, as I have mentioned before, this didn't really solve as a burr and I have an appalling memory. I was going to have to solve this by logic or (more likely) luck! 

In my favour, this should be solvable as a logic problem - all the pieces are identical and there is a partial symmetry to them as you can see here:

12 identical pieces

It should be logical. It should be possible with thought©. So far I have not managed it. I might have to go back to Mike's blog post for a clue using his very in depth analysis because thought© is not one of my strong points. Listen out around the world and you might just hear my shout of success - or, more likely, my swearing about my abject failure. Looking closely at the pieces, I think it can be entered into Burrtools which will also be a fun challenge. Wish me luck!

Should you buy this? I have to say yes - it is very pretty and will look lovely on display, it's a fun challenge in both directions and decidedly different from your standard burr puzzle, plus it's very affordable at $25 CAD which in this day of ever increasing puzzle prices is a real bonus.

Stay safe everyone.

Quick edit - after writing the post and setting it to publish after about 30 minutes - I borrowed some of Allard's brain - it's amazing! He is capable of thinking© really quite hard! When I used his brain, it took me about 30 minutes of analysis and I had the puzzle reassembled. I was not sure that I was going to give his brain back to him but then I wandered around in there and you wouldn't believe what goes on in his head! I have decided that I don't want that around here for any length of time so back it heads to Birmingham - I really don't know how Gill puts up with it! Shudder! 🤣🤣