Burrtastic & an apology!

First of all, let me please apologise to you all for not having posted for a while! I haven't lost interest (blog-fade), but I have been very busy at work and the present Mrs S has gotten rather worn out by constantly having to open the door to the postman to accept puzzle deliveries! At one point she fired up the laser stare and burnt me very badly!! So much so that I couldn't type (and even went temporarily deaf - I'm obviously wired up wrong!!) - this has meant that I have had to read about puzzles, play with puzzles (ocasionally solving puzzles), buy puzzles, photograph puzzles but I haven't dared actually sit down in front of the computer to write about puzzles!!! You can tell from this paragraph why she might have been a very teeny tiny touch miffed at me????

I've promised to improve my ways (and to do some DIY around the house!) and in exchange she will let me carry on my puzzle obsession! Oh yes, and she's out just now so I can write a blog post too! Let me know if you hear her coming back soon!!! I did figure that with the huge swathe of blog posts coming from Rox, Neil, Allard, Scott, Jerry, Jeff and Brian (forgive me if I forgot anyone!!) all about exciting occurrences and puzzles discovered at the IPP then you might forgive me my small lapse!

Over the last 2 years, I initially became known for being a bit of a savant for the wire puzzles and whilst I do enjoy these (especially those by Dick Hess), they are never attractive enough to leave on display - PLUS they jingle, which puts my life at risk from Mrs S! More recently I have ventured into twisties because there is so much variety and they are so logical - all that is required is to use a few techniques and gradually you can expand them to solve almost any new puzzle - PLUS they are relatively cheap. Again, however, they are not attractive!!

I have an absolute love affair (please don't tell her!) with beautiful wooden interlocking puzzles - both burrs and cubes! They look fabulous on display and can have a real "Aha!" moment! Some can be incredibly difficult as well as beautiful - see my review here. So here we go! I think I will introduce a few new puzzles of this type that I have acquired recently.

Piston Burr

Houston! I have a problem!!

Iwahiro cylinder - firmly shut!

I am truly terrible at opening the aluminium puzzles from Wil Strijbos! It took me weeks to open the cylinders. I spent 2 months on the Opening bat from Mr Puzzle. Maybe I shouldn't have bought the Alcyl designed by Iwahiro because on arrival it was almost open and I quickly just tightened it shut and now cannot open it at all! Absolutely no movement whatsoever!!!

In my desperation! Look what I did:

Vertical view

Horizontal view

The problem? Even with these Xrays, I still can't open the damn thing!! Maybe I need to stop puzzling!!!

Hanayama Cast Square

Cast Square

Today it's time for a review of another from my last rather extensive Puzzle Master delivery! This time it is yet another of the Hanayama Cast Puzzles the Cast Square. I chose this one because being really shiny, it appealed to my inner Magpie again and also because it had been rated as a maximum difficulty - a level 6 on the Hanayama scale! Or level 10 (Mind Boggling) on the Puzzle Master scale. At maximum difficulty, I thought this would keep me going for quite some time! It was designed by Finland's Vesa Timonen who is very prolific and has designed several of my previous puzzles - see here and here.

As with all of these puzzles it arrived absolutely beautifully packaged with just the instructions to take it apart and reassemble it. Cryptically it said that putting it back together in a different way leads to a different disassembly strategy being required. This was another feature which appealed to me - more than one puzzle in a single package. It consists of 4 pieces of metal interestingly interlocked, 2 are silver chrome and 2 are gold. The only downside (as you can see from my photo is that fingerprints and dust seem to easily mark the surface. Together it makes a very attractive shape (even Mrs S admitted that), dimensions are 4.8 x 4.8 x 1.3 cm and it is a pretty decent weight. No solution is provided and as I will tell later, you WILL solve it but not in the way intended so I seriously suggest downloading the solution from here. I found it gave me a real insight into the idea behind the puzzle.

Previous reviews can be found by Brian on his blog and by Gabriel on his.

Keyhole

Keyhole

In the midst of all the wonderful coverage of the goings on at the last International Puzzle Party (IPP32) in Washington DC by my fellow bloggers I have hesitated to post a mundane puzzle review. Especially as I can't make it a positive one!

Amongst my last hoard of puzzles (a term I have taken to using to describe the suitcases of my friends who went to the IPP) from Puzzle Master, I received a wire and string puzzle called Keyhole. I got this one because I had decided that it might be a good idea to try my hand at some of the more complex wire puzzles to give myself a bit of a challenge. This one is indeed at the top of their scale at 10 out of 10 (Mind Boggling). Plus with the apparent simplicity of it, I thought it would be a pleasant solve process. Made of wire, sturdy string and painted wooden baubles it measures 12 x 4.9 x 2.5 cm and is a nice tactile puzzle to hold and play with. No solution is included but one can be downloaded from here.

Nickel Box

Nickel Box

In honour of the recently concluded 32nd International Puzzle Party in Washington DC I thought I should review a puzzle that is significantly more than just ordinary. One day I hope that I might be invited to join the great and the good in the puzzling world at an IPP and to show that I am a serious collector of "beautiful and tough puzzles", I introduce the Nickel Box!

Quite a few blind ends!

I have been playing with this on and off for a couple of weeks and have solved it today (at least half solved it). I bought this from the Arteludes webstore. This is a french-based site run by Jean-Baptiste Jacquin which I was able to browse easily courtesy of the built in translation from the Chrome browser (my French is pretty poor)!! For international customers you need to contact Jean-Baptiste himself and he is very helpful. The puzzles on this site are beautiful and most (if not all) have been crafted by the superb Maurice Vigouroux (my copy of the incredibly tough 150 move 18 piece burr, the Tiros, was made by him and is available on the site too - Allard reviewed Tiros here). I couldn't resist it and bought it and another puzzle at the same time!

This puzzle was initially designed by Donald Osselaer and Stephane Chomine added the ornamentation to make it harder. Limited to only 20 copies, it is a caged burr measuring 7.5cm on each axis and is surprisingly heavy (400g) due to the use of Ebony as its main component. The burr pieces are made of Purpleheart in my copy but it is also available as Padauk. The burrs are carved from a single piece of wood with no gluing used at all. The embellishments to the burr pieces and box are made from Beech. Even the present Mrs S (doing ok for a first wife!) immediately said that it was stunning and actually allowed it to sit on the coffee table in the living room for a few days before returning it to my study - this is a major feat for her!!

Hanayama Cast Amour

Cast Amour

Whilst we all sit and wait for news of lovely new toys to come out from the 32nd International Puzzle Party (IPP) in Washington being held just now, I thought I might try and distract you all with "tales of lurve"!!! Yep here we have a heart with what looks like a couple of tails! This is the Cast Amour from Hanayama.

There is also another Tale of Lurve here too! Whilst the present Mrs S has no interest in playing with this (or any other) puzzle, she has agreed in principle that I can go to an IPP in the future (wherever it may be) - how about that for real lurve??? I am too late to go to the current Washington one but hopefully I will get to the next (in Asia somewhere) or the following one in Europe. Now all I need is an invitation. If any of you IPPers out there happen to read my blog - how about it? I quite clearly have a good collection, I even more clearly have a "passion for puzzles"! Do I deserve an invitation to this most prestigious of puzzling events?

I received mine from Puzzle Master as part of their huge selection of Hanayama puzzles. It is rated as 5 out of 6 in the Hanayama difficulty scale or 9 (Gruelling) on the 6 to 10 scale used by Puzzle Master themselves. I personally think it may well be slightly easier than that but others have agreed with the rating. This puzzle was designed by the great Akio Yamamoto and consists of a golden coloured metal male and female symbol intertwined within/through a flattened disk which I initially thought was a heart shape but which the puzzle instructions insists is the shape of the "forbidden fruit". It is 5.2 x 5.2 x 3.1cm and is really shiny and catches my "magpie" eyes very nicely.

This one has been reviewed by Brian here (his only complaint was that the shape doesn't sit straight on a table!), by Gabriel here and Oli on his blog here. The reviews on the Puzzle Master product page for this one were all positive. All of this did make me quite keen to try this one. No solution is provided but you can obtain one here.

Maybe I'm Craaaazy!

OMG! That's a lotta twisty puzzles!

Gnarls Barkley, not so long ago, sang a song asking himself and others whether he was crazy! From some of the looks I get from colleagues and friends, I have begun asking that of myself!! The twisty puzzle collection shown above is (ahem) rather embarrassingly huge and, to put it in context, it is only a small part of my general puzzle collection! So I asked around amongst some other people:

"Does that make me craaaazy?"

Several correspondents were reassuring in an underhand manner - they said:

"I think you're craaaazy!

Just like me"  (???)

During my email conversations with Jon (SuperAntoniovivaldi), Rline and Burgo, it quickly became clear that I have developed a new and extremely rare medical condition! This new condition is quite contagious (judging from the responses of a few nearby puzzlers) and is called "Twisty fever"!

I started off in the 80s (yes! I am that old!) having solved the standard 3x3 and 4x4 cubes but that is as far as it went. Now, in my "middle years", and supposedly having grown out of all that nonsense, having rediscovered puzzles via the revomaze forums (world renowned blogger Allard always says that I should blame Oli (another internationally famous puzzle writer) but we all know that all of this is his fault really!!) I decided that I should at least be able to do 1 or 2 basic cubes and so quite early on in my collection I bought a few basic cubes and quickly rediscovered a few techniques. I then decided that I should try a few more and managed to solve those as well! "I'm a genius!" I thought! So I bought even more and hit a wall. At this point I found the Twisty Puzzles forum (this forum is more aimed at solvers of difficult puzzles and new designs rather than speed cubers) and YouTube and at this point the virus really hit! I'm now the proud owner of more than 70 twisty puzzles including a few which have been handmade at, let's just say, slightly painful expense! This sudden massive expansion of the collection is a cardinal symptom of twisty fever and I'm afraid that there is no cure!!

The only good thing about it is that, by and large, these puzzles tend to be reasonably priced (until you end up buying bespoke or Shapeways puzzles) and even more importantly these puzzles don't jingle and annoy the present Mrs S! At least until they become so numerous that they erupt out of my study and contaminate the rest of the house!!!

So why the title of this blog? It's true that twisty fever makes you go crazy but that is actually not the reason. Speaking to my puzzle friends they all really extolled the virtues of a particular group of puzzles - these are the Crazy 3x3 planet cubes and the Crazy 4x4 II. They apparently provide the challenge of several puzzles in one and also are a series of very similar looking puzzles with hugely varying solution strategies! In my twisty fever haze - I was hooked!

Hanayama Cast Laby

Hanayama Cast Laby

If you read all the way back to the beginning of my huge Puzzle Adventure you will see that it really all began with a hidden maze puzzle - the Revomaze. Since then, I have played with, and solved, quite a few other mazes (Cast L'Oeuf and Medallion, Maze burr, Cast Duet and Cast Cuby) and have really enjoyed them. Several have actually come from Hanayama but I always held off getting the Cast Laby because I never really was attracted to the look of it - all dark charcoal metal. In my recent batch I decided it was really one that I should add to the collection, especially as it is a level 5 out of 6 on the Hanayama difficulty scale or level 9 (Gruelling) on the Puzzle Master 5 to 10 scale.

As usual the Hanayama packaging is immaculate and inside is a pair of thick rings made of a dark charcoal coloured metal, one is a complete ring with a maze inscribed on both sides and the other has a gap to allow it's removal from the other. The easy removal is prevented by a couple of small pins in the gap. Together they are 6.3 x 5 x 2.5 cm in size and feel nice and sturdy. It is clear that the two mazes need to be navigated simultaneously to separate the pieces. These mazes are quite long and include a number of parts that skirt the outer rim giving the impression that this is going to be quite a long haul. The reviews on the Puzzle Master product page are overwhelmingly positive apart from one person who didn't have the attention span to work it out! Some of my fellow bloggers have reviewed it and also enjoyed it - Oli stated that it was a good challenge here, Brian Pletcher enjoyed it having taken an hour to solve it (review here) and Tom Cutrofello was also kept going for quite a while.

No solution is supplied but if you need one (I would hope you wouldn't) it can be downloaded from here.

Wood Wonders!

Does wood wonder?
Yes it does when it is in the hands of Brian Menold. This master craftsman has been making some real beauties recently. Today I'm going to mention 2 puzzles that I bought from him at "Wood Wonders".
First up is the Twin Pentominoes in a Light Box.

Twin Pentominoes in a Light Box

This puzzle was designed by Primativo Familiar Ramos and published at Ishino's Puzzle Will be Played site. My version is made from Zebra wood, Maple and Red oak (absolutely gorgeous!). It consists of 12 pentominoes of varying conformations which fit into a lattice box. The aim is to remove the pieces and then put them back again! Taking it apart was slightly challenging for me because it has been rather humid in the UK recently with more or less 3 months of continuous rain and I think the humidity had caused a little expansion (Brian had stated that he originally made it quite loose and I do remember that one piece used to just drop out). Eventually by tapping it in every direction I found the first piece to remove and thereafter it was easy to remove the lot:

Black Widow

Black Widow

By now the majority of you must know that I really lurve wire puzzles!! I am less fond of those with string because they are just so damn difficult and you just end up in knots. That's not the bad part, however! I only get upset when I then can't undo the knots and have to cut or otherwise dismantle the puzzle. I practically have a heart attack when I give it to someone else and they later hand it back to me in such a tangle that I again have to attack it with scissors (yes Rachel, this means you!!!!)

I wanted some more difficult disentanglement puzzles and so in my last order from Puzzle Master I bought some of the level 9 and level 10 wire puzzles. This one is the Black Widow - it should be a relatively easy one (for an experienced puzzler like me - Blush) at level 9 (Gruelling) and for a beginner should be a real challenge. It arrived in the usual neat Puzzle Master clamshell packaging with a card insert saying to remove the string. It consists of what looks like the olympic rings intertwined with a snake and is made out of strong wire. There is a complete loop of string fed through it with a ball preventing it being fed through any of the rings. It is 6.4 x 10.8 cm and pretty good value at $10. No solution is supplied but if you really have to give up, then it can be downloaded from here! I don't think you will need to download it to solve but it will certainly be helpful to understand what is going on.