An "Ultimate" puzzle - maybe it will be yours soon?

The 2x4x6 - Ultimate shape-shifting cuboid - notice the 1 next to the HP

This beauty is currently the only one of its kind in the world just now (hence the 1 next to the signature). Hunter Palshook initially made me a couple of puzzles which I absolutely love and we have struck up a good friendship since then. He posted on the Twisty Puzzles forum that he had managed to create a new puzzle - this is the 2x4x6 cuboid pictured above - it is the smallest memeber of the category that has been named the "Ultimate shapeshifting cuboids". Hunter managed to make one from one of the TomZ's 4x4x6 cuboids. Looking at it, it is clear that an enormous amount of work and skill has gone into it's manufacture (including beautifully hand cut stickers). He decided that he would let me have it - but on one condition!

Cast Box

Hanayama Cast Box

Continuing with my recent batch of puzzles from Puzzle Master, I had decided to try the latest 2 of the puzzles from Hanayama. I love the stuff this company produces! It is pocketable, beautifully made and packaged, varies from fairly easy for beginners to extremely tough for puzzle freaks and really appeals to the Magpie in me.

Just this year Hanayama released the Cast Harmony (reviewed here) and this one, the Cast Box. It is packaged in the same black box with only the instructions to remove the ring from the box (and then obviously return it). It is made from a nice antiqued brass with just the word start which the shiny chrome ring straddles. Size wise the cube is 3.6 cm along each side and the ring is 5cm in diameter. It has a nice heft to it so would make a serious dent in a wall if you threw it away in disgust! Luckily it is only a level 2 on Hanayama's 6 point difficulty scale and a Level 6 (Tricky) on Puzzle Master's 5-10 scale. This means that you will not find it particularly difficult but it does provide a rather nice discovery moment. No solution is provided (as with all these puzzles) and it can be downloaded from here. You really shouldn't need the solution! Gabriel reviewed it here but be careful - he did give a small spoiler on how to solve it!

Happy Birthday Puzzlemad... 2 years old today

My pride and joy!!!

Yes, on March 13th 2011 Puzzlemad was born! It does seem longer than that! It feels like I've been writing about this stuff forever.

I have had a hell of a journey over the last 2 years. I started puzzling nearly a year before I began blogging and in that short period of time I have managed to accumulate over 570 puzzles, solve most of them (there is a moderate queue waiting to be solved) and make a huge number of friends from all over the world. I even get to meet a few of them fairly regularly at our Midlands puzzle parties - all welcome!

The topic today is not a review of a particular puzzle but a list of my top 5ish puzzles of all time from my collection. Believe me, this is a really hard set to choose and any designers and craftsmen out there who might be miffed because I didn't include you, don't be! My top 20 or 30 puzzles all came out pretty close to each other.

Trick Bolt #1

Trick Bolt #1

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed the Trick bolt #2 puzzle made by Puzzle Master and I said that I would hopefully be next reviewing the much harder first in the series - Trick Bolt #1! Obviously this would be dependent on me actually solving the thing first.

I was not sure that I would actually manage to solve it particularly quickly when I read that Gabriel had failed to solve it over quite a period of time before finally posting his review! Now Gabriel is a pretty amazing puzzler so I was really worried that I would fail dismally and not to get a review for you. So basically as soon as I finished the last episode I picked up this puzzle to give me a chance of solving it before it was time for my next Puzzle Master review. What mechanism could possible have kept Gabriel stumped for so many weeks?

This puzzle is packaged nicely just as the last one was and is rated as 7 out of 10 (Challenging) just like the other. I personally think that 7 is the correct score for this one and that 6 is probably closer to the truth for bolt #2. It is also very good value at $10. Sizewise it is rather different to the other in the series - it is short and stubby with dimensions of 7.7 x 2.7 x 3cm and is a good heft in the hand being made of the same antique brass metal as the other one. Just like the other there is no solution provided - if you really need it then you can download it here.

It's good to have a puzzle friend... Or is it?

Rattle Twist Duo

I have mentioned many times that I love the community associated with puzzling - there is no shortage of people to tell you about new puzzles, to stimulate you to try harder at solving some you are struggling with and also to either give tips or as a last resort, when you are about to rip your last remaining follicles of hair out, to actually tell you what to do so you can finally put a puzzle away! I feel very privileged that I have friends now from all over the world who either write comments on my blog or even contact me via email. In fact every morning when I wake up I have a few emails waiting for me to read from my new friends.

Trick Bolt #2

Trick Bolt #2

Continuing my sojourn through my Puzzle Master purchases we come to the Trick bolt number 2. I currently own one other trick bolt which I got from Wil Strijbos and it is a wonderful piece of work. It is not particularly tough but is just beautifully engineered and a really elegant solution. I have been hoping for a year now that Wil would produce some more in his bolt series (there are quite a few) but it never seems to happen! Come on Wil! I've been waiting for ages!!

So in the absence of any new Strijbos bolts I decided to try and find some others. Now absolutely top of my list of wants are the absolutely glorious set of bolts (I'd like the keys too!) hand made in brass by the incomparable workmanship of Rocky Chiaro. Unfortunately, they work out quite expensive at approximately $80 each and seeing as I would want the full set of 6, this would break my piggy bank at the moment. If the puzzle fairy is reading then my address is.....

So as my next choice for a trick bolt I had seen this mass produced version reviewed by Gabriel here on his blog - he had solved this one first and when he wrote it up had failed to solve number 1! I decided that I would also do them in the same order - I do have both so expect another review at a later date. My hope is, of course, that I can actually solve it myself.

It is made by Puzzle Master themselves and arrives in a nice blue box rather reminiscent of the Hanayama packaging. The puzzle is a good size (9.9 x 3 x 3 cm) and a decent weight. Puzzle Master rate it as 7 out of 10 (Challenging) on their scale of 6 to 10 and I would make it a 6 myself. I think it is pretty good quality for just $10. No solution is provided with the puzzle but if you really need it then the solution can be downloaded from here.

I love these but maybe I shouldn't buy!

Quintet in F

I have mentioned several times over the last couple of years that the great James Dalgetty, the owner/curator/guru of the Puzzle Museum, advised me at least twice that I really should focus my collecting on just one subtype of puzzle from the great puzzle classification. As you know I have totally ignored him and become a total magpie and collected just about everything I could get my hands on with the exception of jigsaws and dexterity puzzles.

Breadbox

Unhappy childhood

I have gradually worked out that there are some things that I am absolutely rubbish at and so have started to avoid them. For example I have more or less given up on 3D packing puzzles. I started off with the most beautiful of 3D packing puzzles - Make room from Mr Puzzle was a horrendous failure for me (reviewed here) then decreasing the complexity to a puzzle with "just" 2 layers, Unhappy Childhood, made by my good friend Neil was a similar failure. I simplified further to enjoying them when they were simple trays with 2D packing puzzles and wrote a glowing report of David Litwin's Breadbox and also solved the slightly harder classic tray puzzle, Blockhead, which I bought from Brian Menold at Wood Wonders.

Blockhead - only 4 pieces but quite tough

Cast Harmony

Cast Harmony

In my recent post on my blog about the Sidewinder puzzle I said that I was coming to the end of my batch from Puzzle Master and I might need to get some more. Well "BLUSH" I couldn't resist it and another nice big parcel arrived last week much to the disgust of the present Mrs S! I spent about half an hour unpacking and stroking and generally drooling before she got really annoyed at me and made me put them away.

This batch included 2 of the newest ones from Hanayama which I had been very keen to get hold of. This one is the Cast Harmony and I had been drooling over it for nearly 2 years! I remember seeing that having been designed by Dmitry Pevnitskiy and Kirill Grebnev it had won the Puzzler's award at the Japanese IPP (#30) in 2010 and, whilst I am not in the least bit musical, I loved the association of the musical shapes and really wanted one. But despite it being available from Kirill's site, at $100 that was just too much for me for a wire disentanglement puzzle. So I sat and drooled intermittently. I was really pleased when one of my habitual tours to the Hanayama site showed me that they were releasing a version (I presume with the designers' permission).

It consists of a nice golden coloured treble clef which is interlocked with a silver quaver and obviously the aim is to separate them. As usual, the Hanayama packaging is the immaculate black box. The puzzle is 10 x 4.5 x 3.7 cm and is a nice weight. Boy! Does this one appeal to the magpie in me (Rox will love it!) it is gorgeous. Hanayama rate this as 2 out of 6 and Puzzle Master rate it as 6 (Tricky) on their 5-10 scale and I would agree with these ratings - it is pretty easy. No solution is provided and as far as I can tell there is no downloadable version available. But don't fear you won't need one but if you do collect the solution pdf files then it can be downloaded from here. It is much more attractively priced than the original at $13.

First there was the cube - and then.....

Surely this cannot be real!!!

This is the 3x5x7 cuboid - it was designed by the truly amazing Gregoire Pfennig and is available (not cheap) from Puzzle Maestro’s Shapeways store. At present I think it is probably the toughest cuboid available in the world although I’m sure not for how long - it is my absolute favourite twisty puzzle just now and has stimulated me to write a more general post about cuboids.

As you have probably realised over the last year, I have become progressively more addicted to twisty puzzles. I embarked on this odyssey with some trepidation - I emailed a few of the more vocal twisty puzzlers and asked them “what was their secret?” and “how do you go about a approaching a new puzzle?”. Now Rox was her usual mad self and told me that the puzzzles "talk to her" and she just listened to them and they would tell her how to solve them! Well, if I waited for that to happen, I’d never manage to solve anything - I may (or may not) hear voices but couldn’t possibly say in public for fear of being carried off by the men in white coats. Crazy Bad Cuber and SuperAnonioVivaldi were very helpful but couldn’t really tell me what they do. But they basically said that they had learned basic algorithms and added some more complex algorithms and over time and after experimentation they had learned what other effects they had on the puzzle. After that, solving came fairly naturally with trial and experimentation. All of these “Gods” of the twisty puzzle world were very encouraging, trying to entice me into their world. I was still very skeptical about it but decided to give it a go and buy a “few” twisty puzzles!

Well 85 puzzles later I can categorically say that they were right! I have actually reached a point where I can pick up a new puzzle and after some investigation, I can often (although not always) work out an approach to solving it using just existing algorithms (sometimes used in unusual ways) and am now even starting to understand the process of making commutators (techniques for cycling pieces by combining short sequences). I am far away from the genius of at least a dozen of the guys on the Twisty Puzzle forum but I feel I have reached a point at which I can even consider myself able to teach - at the moment I’m sort of assisting a young man in Australia via Facebook messenger - who'd have believed it?

Enough rambling!!! What are you going to review?

The main focus of this topic is one that a few correspondents have requested that I write about - when you have learned the basic cubes (3x3 & 4x4) then the options I’ve discussed before open up to you. In that article I chose an eclectic mixture of shape mods, crazy cubes and alternative shapes but ultimately my real favourites have been the cuboids of which I now have about 15. A little while ago I was amazed to see that SuperAntonioVivaldi had produced a summary of the different families of cuboid based on approach to solving. I think that this wonderful treatise needs to be shared so I asked his permission (and received it) to publish a summary of it on my blog for all general puzzlers to read. Thanks so much! If you want to watch his original video then visit his YouTube classification video here.

The Sidewinder and the Teddy!

Sidewinder

I seem to be coming to the end of my last batch of puzzles from Puzzle Master - this means that it is definitely time to order some more! You know I can't resist it - they have such a huge selection to choose from! The Sidewinder is one of Puzzle Master's own range of wire and string puzzles - as you know by now, the puzzles with string in them frighten me a lot due to the horrendous knots you can get into. Although I have to say that only one of the Puzzle Master puzzles has ever ended up so badly knotted that I have had to physically dismantle it to solve it.

This one looked fairly uncomplicated in it's construction so I figured that it would be unlikely to end up in too much of a mess. We'll come back to that later! It is really good value at $10 and whilst it doesn't look like much, remember that it is rated at level 10 out of 10 (Mind Boggling) so be prepared for a real challenge. It arrives in the usual nice clamshell packaging with the only instructions being to remove the string and balls from the metal structure. It is nicely compact at 13.3 x 4.1 cm and the string is 35cm long. This means it will fit in your pocket whilst you are out and about and annoy the hell out of your wife at all sorts of inopportune moments (OUCH! - sorry dear!). No solution is provided and if you need one then you can down load it from here.