PuzzleMaster Kickstarter Part 2

Trick Bolt #4

Continuing the theme from last week, the PuzzleMaster Kickstarter campaign continues until end of December. Last week I described the 3 new puzzles that are the main feature but there are also 3 add-on puzzles that can be added to any order on the Kickstarter for a fraction of the cost on the PuzzleMaster site.

Starting with the Trick Bolt number 4 which is available as an add-on for just $8CAD compared with the $14.99 on their site. The aim is to remove the middle nut from the bolt. This is a lovely little challenge that is fun for any experienced puzzler as well as great for a beginner and children - it is rated as Tricky or level 6 on their 5 to 10 scale of difficulty. There are a couple of lovely little Aha! moments in it. This could probably be considered a rather basic sequential discovery puzzle. For $8 you really cannot go wrong. I will be taking this to work with me to encourage my colleagues to take up puzzling.

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Celestial Cipher

From the easy Trick Bolt 4 we move up a notch in difficulty. In fact we move right up to the top! The Celestial Cipher is an anodised metal 8 piece board burr. It is rather attractive in silver and gold. rather fiddly to play with due to the diminutive size - 4.5 x 2.9 x 4.7cm. PuzzleMaster rate this as a level 9 (Gruelling) on their odd scale and I personally would make it a level 10. The normal price for this one is $21.75CAD but as an add-on to the Kickstarter it is reduced to $16 - that is a steal!

The movement of the pieces is nice and smooth and you can see all the gaps and paths which should make it easier to dismantle but despite this, it is really quite a huge challenge with a good few blind alleys to go down. This one took me quite a few weeks to take apart - not for the fainthearted and only the very best burr-puzzler will manage to reassemble it without Burrtools. I needed BT and discovered that there are 12 possible assemblies raging from an "easy" level 19 (4.2.3.3.2.3.2) up to the hardest level 27 (10.5.3.3.2.3) which is the one that it arrived in. This potentially gives you a bunch of challenges if you can find someone to assemble it each time for you in a new challenge. Unfortunately Mrs S won't do that for me!

As a quick word of warning, don't let you cat lick this puzzle! Yes, I know that is an odd thing to write but my two kittens have a weird fascination with cold metal objects. They lick them all. taps/faucets, metal trivets and metal puzzles! Nothing I do will stop them licking everything which can give aa nasty surprise when you pick up something that is unexpectedly wet and sticky. 😱 The Celestial Cipher became a bit sticky to move and then the surface corroded. I have no idea what is in a cat's saliva that does that but don't let them do that to yours!

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Houdini's Torture Cell - PuzzleMaster version

If you don't have the Houdini's Torture Cell yet then this is a very good reason to join the Kickstarter and buy it for a very reasonable price of $36CAD (reduced from the usual $44.99). If you don't want the Kickstarter puzzles then you should buy this anyway - many of us would consider this an essential puzzle for anyone's collection. I did not get sent a copy of this because they know that I have an original version from Brian Young.

Brian collaborated with PuzzleMaster to recreate this amazing puzzle in metal and the result is stunning. I have payed with it at an MPP and it is good and solid with an amazing heft to it. The puzzling is identical to the wooden version and with a curved acrylic cage it shouldn't suffer from the same micro cracks that plagued the original. The puzzle was good enough to win the Jury first prize in the 2012 IPP design competition. That alone should tell you it is worth getting hold of. 

The mechanism is all on show and beautiful to work out (unlike the complete bugger of an identical blind challenge in the last lock of The Opening Bat. This reminds me that I should fetch out my copy to take to work again and bamboozle a whole new bunch of trainees, surgeons, ODPs and nurses. This is a simply wonderful puzzle!

You have just 16 days from the publication of this article to join the Kickstarter campaign. There are a bunch of great puzzles available and here I have shown that the add-ons are also worth considering.

PuzzleMaster Has An Opportunity For You

Crazy Lock designed by Christoph Lohe

I was contacted a few months ago by Leon Stein, one of the co-owners of PuzzleMaster, to ask whether I would be interested in looking at their upcoming Kickstarter campaign puzzles and would I show them off to the world? Well, I have some experience of the PuzzleMaster Kickstarter puzzles and have heartily recommended them each time. Of course, I agreed. I would be foolish to pass up the new creations and I thought that you, my readers, would want to see my opinion. The Kickstarter is now up and running with a close date of 31st December so if any of these interest you then get over there and place an order. They have reached the minimum to actually go ahead and so this will definitely be happening, with the aim of shipping puzzles to backers in June/July 2026.

This time there are 3 main puzzles in the campaign plus there are 3 add-on puzzles (ones already on the PuzzleMaster store) which can be added to your pledge to get a bit of a discount.

The first one I tried was the Crazy Lock. It's a burr in the shape of a lock - I can't resist burrs, I have a passing fondness for locks and a burr lock is irresistible to me - in fact I have quite a lot of them now. I wasn't disappointed and neither will you be - it is great.

The box states that it is level 8 on the PM 5 to 10 scale and I actually think it should be rated a bit higher at 9. I significantly struggled to dismantle it. The design was made by the late Christoph Lohe and was originally published as Burlock E. 

I have actually solved Burrlock E many many years ago when I bought it from Eric Fuller (he also adored Christoph's designs and always produced great challenges). Way back then I described it as a serious challenge for mere mortal puzzlers like me and it is still that. With a level of 26.2.3.2.2, this has a really significant difficulty to it. It took me about a week to dismantle it and then I was unable to assemble again without Burrtools. Creating the file was a bit of a challenge but at least I was finally able to put it back together again. For those of you who are burr assembly experts, there is an alternative assembly (level 26.3.3.2.2 which has the key hosizontally in the lock at the end. Double the challenge for one puzzle.

Burrlock E from Cubic Dissection (2017)

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Fortress of Shadows by Christoph Lohe

The next puzzle for me to play with was the Fortress of Shadows burr (also by Christoph) it is quite diminutive (1.75 x 1.25 x 1.25") but beautifully made with gold coloured burr pieces trapped inside a black anodised castle with 4 turrets. These turrets very much limited the movements of the pieces. I spent another 2 weeks working on this one. You can see everything that is going on inside but it is still a hugely difficult challenge with level 30.1.2 as the pieces move back and forth progressively making space to allow the first piece out. It looked familiar to me but I couldn't place it properly. I did go back and check my photo database and realised that Pelikan had produced a different version of the puzzle 5 years ago (called Castle) which I had reviewed here - that one had not been terribly difficult but this version is a significant advance in difficulty. 

I would be very impressed by anyone who could assemble it from scratch but I definitely needed a Burrtools file and this was a fun one to make and follow in reverse to fully assembled.

The original Castle by Christoph - similar but different to the Fortress of Shadows

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Twisted Logic by Yavuz Demirrhan

This rather beautiful 4 piece anodised burr looked very familiar to me and, as with all the other puzzles in my collection, I had a vague memory of owning it and solving it once but the process was a mystery to me. Looking back I realised that the original version was a puzzle I had actually solved twice. Chiasma was a design by the amazing Yavuz Demirrhan that PuzzleMaster had made before in a very limited run that I had reviewed back in 2020 and had compared the metal version with the original wooden one from Pelikan. In fact the handmade metal version is still available on the PuzzleMaster site but is not cheap. The newer one will be mass produced for a fraction of that cost.

I recalled that this one had been incredibly difficult. There are 4 identical board burrs that gradually extend apart and then sequentially line up the exit points to allow removal of pieces. I found it very confusing to work on and this is not made easier by the need to prevent the pieces rotating. I don't think there are any rotational shortcuts but it needs you to keep the pieces aligned to move them around safely. It's quite fun to explore but I would suggest that you use a back and forth approach to make sure that you know what you have done as it's easy to get lost. At one point I had the pieces quite extended apart from each other and in a dead end and struggled to return to the beginning. The rather low solution level of 16.4.6 would sort of imply that it shouldn't be too hard but don't be fooled - it is a huge challenge to move around, control the pieces and keep track. The solution is really not obvious. 

Chiasma - Pelikan version

Chiasma - original PM version

I will return next week with a review of the add-on puzzles from the Kickstarter campaign - this is definitely well worth inverting in. They are great challenges, beautifully made and an amazing price.

It Eclipsed My Abilities for a Long Time

Total Eclipse from PuzzleMaster

I have had the Total Eclipse puzzle sitting on my desk next to me in my, ahem, "backlog of puzzles to solve" for an embarrassingly long period of time. It has been there for over a year! First it was unsolved because I was too busy, then it remained unsolved because I couldn't work it out, then it got, BLUSH, buried in other puzzles to be solved and finally unsolved because I kept going round and round in circles. Yes, I am not very bright and I often use the Einstein's madness approach of doing the same thing over and over again until something changes.

I had bought it because it was an Oskar van Deventer design (pretty much anything he designs is incredible - I really need to get hold of a couple of copies of the Zigguflat puzzle that has been enjoyed by so many brilliant puzzlers and combine into one large fabulous N-ary puzzle. I also have been quite intrigued by the amazing series of PuzzleMaster's own metal creations. The Honeycomb puzzle recently created as a KickStarter is now available direct from them.

The Toal Eclipse consists of 2 interlocking rings (one chrome and one brass) inside a black metal cage. It is about 6.5cm in diameter and difficulty score of 9 on their odd 5 - 10 scale. I think the level is about right. The inner rings can rotate around inside the cage freely - it is very similar in idea to the Hanayama Cast Equa (also by Oskar) which I reviewed after a huge struggle many years ago. It also share a small similarity with the Hanayama Cast Duet (yes, another Oskar design) reviewed here. Obviously there needs to be a spot on the cage where the rings can be released. I found that straight away. The two rings each have a gap in them which allows them to interlock and presumably is where they disassemble from the cage. The reason they don't just come apart is because the gap has a polarity and straight away it is obvious that the polarity is reversed at the beginning the process:

The grooves in the cage are on the opposite side to the ring.
The ring obviously needs to be reversed to come off.

It is obvious that the aim is to move the pieces around so that the grooves in the cage line up with the ring. How do you do that? There are single grooves on the cage (different orientation to the release grooves) and the rings can be slid from segment to segment through a maze until the ring has the correct orientation.

In my multiple previous attempts to solve this puzzle I had found a shortcut - my copy has a slight flaw where the ring can be passed over the groove in the cage with the orientation the wrong way around. I realised early on that this was not right and did my best to avoid it. This turned the puzzle into a nightmare for me! There are multiple ways to work your way around the cage and tantalisingly there are a few places where the grooves occur on both sides allowing either orientation to pass. I found this no help whatsoever! I went round and round in circles in multiple directions and always ended up back at the beginning with the ring unable to slide off. OMG! I began to question my sanity which I have to say Mrs S has done many times. I kept having to put it down.

Finally lined up!

After the recent tidy up of my hellscape of desk, I suddenly found the Total Eclipse under a rather large pile and decided at the end of last week to try again and be finally able to put it away. I took it to work with me, I played in the evenings and everywhere for a bit. After annoying everyone for a week with my jingling. I had an Aha! moment and the brass ring came off. Yessss! The chrome ring was obviously the same and would need the same path - except I had no recollection of how the first one had come off. I went round and round in circles again. Each time I was back at the beginning there was a great offing and blinding. This was a very difficult puzzle! One more try and I suddenly noticed something about the possible positions and found a sort of figure of eight sequence that was able to reverse the polarity of the ring and then I had to make it back to the double groove position. This was easier said than done but I got there and could breathe a sigh of relief.

At last!

Having done this, it was time to return to the start position. This should just be a matter of reversing what I had done but of course, I couldn't remember what I had done! At least this time I had a vague idea of what was required and it only took me a whole day to do it. 

For just $25CAD this puzzle is a really good buy! It is quite attractive, very tactile as a fiddling object and most importantly, offers a LOT of puzzling without getting hopelessly lost (you always get back to the beginning even when you don't want to). At over a year to solve it, I have definitely got my money's worth.

Watch out next week for the first release of 2024 by Pelikan...

A Kickstarter Opportunity

Honeycomb by Oskar van Deventer

I received an advance copy of the Honeycomb puzzle designed by the great Oskar a month or so ago and the Kickstarter for it just went live today. The cells of the honeycomb are threaded and can be removed one at a time (at least up until several have been removed). Scramble the pieces and see whether you can reassemble it in place. Obviously, if you have taken a picture then that would be a big help but try not to do that.

The kickstarter is at:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/puzzlemaster/the-honeycomb-metal-puzzle-brain-teaser-from-puzzle-master

It is beautifully packaged like all the Puzzlemaster own brand metal puzzles and will make a nice addition to any collection.

Nice box

beautifully made