Pelikan Final Release of 2024

Puzzles just released by Pelikan puzzles

This may well be a little late for many of you who don't keep an eye out on the Pelikan website or follow me on Facebook. I received a package out of the blue about 10 days ago and had very little time at first to do any more than open it and take my photos. I am definitely not clever enough to solve all of these challenging puzzles in just 5 days and Jakub wanted to get them up for sale before he and his team go off on their well-earned Christmas break. These puzzles went up for sale on Thursday and I'm afraid that at least 2 are sold out already. If there is anything that you particularly want to buy then keep an eye on the auction sites or see whether Jakub might agree to make another batch - sometimes if enough people ask then he does get agreement from the designers to make a few more.

In this release there are some truly stunning and clever designs:
Minima Smiley by Frederic Boucher
Trimini Frame by Lucie Pauwels
Euklid's Cabrio by Dr Volker Latussek
Nested Soma by Dr Volker Latussek with Lucie Pauwels
Lunchbox by George Miller

Minima Smiley

There have been quite a lot of Minima puzzles over the last few years. The series started out as fun small packing puzzles with relatively simple pieces to fit in a small box with restricted entry and usually some odd holes or slots to allow rotations to occur. I have now bought lots and lots of these and thoroughly love the combination of thought, fiddling and Aha! moments. Several other designers have jumped on the Minima bandwagon and I have, of course, added these to my collection (partially thanks to Tye Stahly's Nothing Yet Designs site as well as Jakub and Jaroslav's Pelikan puzzles. 

When I received this one, I really wasn't sure what to make of it. All the pieces were inside and there seemed to be a ball in there too as well as a bolt in the side. What on earth was going on here. It cannot be a packing puzzle - is it an unpacking puzzle? Does such a thing exist? It would appear that Frederic has branched out into other genre's again (remember the amazing Res Q and my own special Visitor Q?) This time the aim is to work out how to release the ball.

Initially only the ball moves from one empty space to another but no further than that and therefore the only thing available to me was to remove the bolt. I got a bit of a surprise at the sheer length of it! After removal, there was suddenly the ability to slide a piece around and this opened up a bit of pathway for the ball. Except it wouldn't go very far and then nothing else happens. I was able to work out what the shapes were inside the box and map them out - there is absolutely no way any more is going to happen. Now I know that Frederic is a sneaky so and so and Jakub is very happy to encourage this sneakiness. A little exploration with fingers revealed something interesting and also some rather strong magnets. a tiny bit more progress happens but I get stuck again. Whilst exploring at this point, I realise that a piece can rotate and I eagerly encourage it only to find it doesn't really help me. Once I realised this, I tried to get it all back to the start and, OMG, it wouldn't go! Cue, minor panic before I got it all reset after 15 minutes of swearing at myself whilst Mrs S giggled at me and said that I don't seem to be very good at this puzzling business - oh, the shame!

I was stumped and had to draw the shapes and the box to work out a possible alternative sequence. Only after I had drawn it out was I able to make further steps and I could see the reason for the name of the puzzle:

Now I have to get the little bugger back inside

Having taken my photo, I tried to reset it, only to hear a lout "clack!" as the pieces reset themselves. OMG, my heart leapt into my throat again and I was forced to work it out from scratch again. For a while I kept trying it wrong and repeatedly heard that clack again and again until I realised the move needed to prevent it.

This is wonderful - very clever and shows that Frederic is able to set his talented brain to all types of puzzle. It has been absolutely beautifully made by Pelikan in Mahogany and Maple.

Trimini Frame

Trimini Frame by Lucie Pauwels

There have been a couple of incredible packing puzzle/antislide puzzles by Lucie this year (Minimal Frame and Open Frame which is still available as I type). I really struggled even to solve the basic packing element of these and completely failed with both of them to solve the antislide challenge. I was amazed at the last MPP when Wil Strijbos sidled up to me and showed me the he had solved it in about 10 minutes. I shouldn't have been surprised as the man is a total genius at design and solving. That display made me all the more determined to succeed at the latest of the challenges. Based on a triangular grid there are 8 oddly shaped pieces to place in a frame with only a single triangular voxel at the corner to hold the pieces in place.

Pepper Castor (another triangular grid)

This time I decided to be more analytical rather than just randomly place pieces in the tray. My usual approach to packing puzzles really isn't terribly efficient. A little trial and error revealed that certain pieces would either have to be oriented a particular direction if the abutted an edge or they would need to be positioned in the interior. This realisation was the key and significantly decreased the number of random moves. It didn't make it easy by any stretch but a true analytical approach made this solvable even by an eejit like me! After about 30 minutes of swearing under my breath, I had a true Aha! moment and it was solved. Absolutely wonderful to play with a triangular grid for once (very few designers do this - the best that I can recall is Alexander Magyaric's Play-girl and Play-boy puzzles as well as his Pepper Castor). There are still 13 in stock as I type - well worth buying to challenge yourself and even non-puzzlers.

Euklid's Cabrio

Euklid's Cabrio by Dr Volker Latussek

This is the second in the Cabriolet series from Dr Latussek. The use of the sliding-lid box has been used before by Hajime Katsumoto and Mineyuki Uyematsu with Slide Packing which I wrote about in 2016. The original Cabrio was a wonderful challenge on similar lines with Volker's own little twist. Of course, Volker is always exploring variations on what he has done before and surprisedmhimself when he found a way to use the Euclid type blocks with the Cabrio style box and we have an incredible challenge as a result which will really keep you think©ing for a while.

Interesting pieces

On arrival the lid is just sitting on top of the pieces and there's no way to slide it on. The aim is to find out which pieces go in the lid and which in the base which will allow it to slide together. A quick exploration revealed to me a really nice looking arrangement of the pieces which would fill those criteria. It looked beautiful! You knew as soon as you read that, that my arrangement was going to be wrong. Volker would never let the obvious solution be the correct one! I spent a good hour or so desperately trying to get that to work and it was totally impossible! The sliding pieces just wouldn't reach far enough to allow subsequent pieces to go in. Think©! There must be another way. 

Not only is this a packing puzzle...this is a sliding piece puzzle. Getting everything in place is going to need careful placement and then careful jiggling about inside to make room for subsequent pieces. I needed another couple of days to figure this one out in my head (luckily there is plenty of space in there). I let out a huge shout when I finally closed the box with all the pieces inside - that man is a genius!

Make sure that you pay proper attention to what you do and how the pieces sit inside because it will require an exact sequence of moves to get them out again and initially you will be blind with a box that is closed or only opens a little bit. As you would expect, I got the box stuck in the closed position for a panicked hour as I shook it about and desperately tried to work out how to open the bloody thing! I actually had to sit down for a bit and think to open it and felt a sudden urge for a gin when I finally did it. I have managed it a few times since then and it is incredibly clever. This is an essential to all followers of Volker and all packing aficionados. 

Nested Soma

Nested Soma - a collaboration by Lucie Pauwels and Dr Volker Latussek

Lucie has recently designed a new puzzle in the Minima series, the Minima nest (I haven't gotten around to it yet), and she decided to try and create a bigger version using a shifted 3x3x3 box. When Volker saw the puzzle idea, he suggested that she try and use slightly altered Soma pieces and sent her a couple of designs for the pieces and then the Nested Soma was born.

The manufacturing skill for this puzzle is totally off the scale! It is stunning made from Elm and Bubinga. The puzzle screams to fit the pieces inside and as you do so it quickly gets blocked up leaving spaces inside that cannot be reached. Time to solve it outside of the box and then you realise that it isn't very stable when the pieces are piled up on a table or your lap. A combination approach would be good. My trial and error approach rapidly failed. There are some very peculiar shapes which have to be fitted into a very restricted part of the box and quite quickly I saw that one piece could only fit in a particular orientation and, gulp, it needed a rotational move - Burrtools won't help much here.

I spent about an hour having increasingly useful breakthroughs and inched my way forwards progressively. The final Aha! moments are delicious. I have posted the solved puzzle because it appears on the Pelikan page - it's a minimal spoiler as most of it cannot be seen.

Solved - really not much of a spoiler here

Lunchbox

Lunchbox by George Miller

I think this might be my first puzzle by George which is strange because he has been very prolific for a very long time. Recently he and Roxanne have been focussed on creating the greatest puzzle museum in the world. 

George wrote this about it:

"Lunchbox is a variation of a puzzle I found in a pile of puzzles I had purchased in Prague. One of the puzzles was simply 10 pieces of wood with no clue as to the goal. I guessed it had to be a symmetric solid shape and began to explore all of the possibilities. This was, in essence, a meta puzzle – that is – and the goal, then solve the puzzle by stacking the pieces into the shape of the goal. The ten pieces were all the ways four 2 unit squares of one unit thickness could be glued together at with two unit cubes cubes glued to the squares to form a checkered patterns on each piece.

I made a copy of the ten pieces on a 3D printer. I used BurrTools to test using these ten pieces to pack a 4x5x3 shape I called a “sandwich”. I forced the squares to the top and bottom and the red cubes to the middle making it look ever so much like a jelly sandwich.

A simple packing puzzle is fun, but making a good puzzle involves a presentation mode plus a theme or story. A presentation mode too often is simply the solved puzzle. This takes away the pleasure of a discovered solution. Again, using BurrTools I found a solid packing of a set of steps with a unique solution. This led to the development of a box in the shape of a lunch pail with the inside conforming to the shape of the set of stairs. The story then becomes that of a young lad taking to school a lunchbox prepared by his mother. When he opens the box he finds his lunch in many pieces he has to pack together into a delicious sandwich before eating his lunch. Putting the pieces back into the lunchbox presents a puzzle unto itself."

This challenge is incredibly well presented - it arrives in one of the solved positions with the pieces packed in the box. Tipping them out reveals the wonderful variety of ways that 2 cubies can be placed on the 4 tetrominoes with gaps.

All the tetrominoes with checkerboard patterns

The first challenge is to create a sandwich from the contents of the lunchbox. Jakub has made the pieces in such a way that it looks like a piece of meat between 2 slices of white bread. I initially attempted to make it so that only checkerboard pieces were next to each other. This seriously restricted the pieces that I could try in each position but left me unable to form the 4x5x3 shape. Once I had determined that it might be impossible with pure checkerboard positioning, I looked at other arrangements and with some thought created lunch:

One ham sandwich

Burrtools tells me that there are another 3 ways to make my sandwich - I will keep working on it. Getting the pieces back into the box has so far proven impossible for me. I know the shape to achieve and it is not a simple cuboid which seems to be confusing me. I will be using Burrtools in the meantime. 

Unlike the sandwich, the orientation of the white bread is not all in the same direction which seems to confuse my feeble brain a lot. It is very similar to the Tabula cubes I wrote about way back in 2013 which I really struggled with:

Tabula cube 1	Tabula cube 2
Tabula cube 1 pieces	Tabula cube 2 pieces

These puzzles are selling very fast - order them quick if you don't want to miss out. They are all amazing. My favourites are Minima Smiley, Nested Soma and Euklid's Cabrio.

Seven Puzzles From Pelikan Not To Miss In November

Pelikan release for end of 2024

Today I am reviewing the upcoming release of gorgeous delights from Jakub, Jaroslav and the Pelikan team. You may have seen the video already by Ivan - he also does all the photography for the Pelikan site and he is brilliant at it.

Twister Box

Twister Box - a new Pelikan design

This beautiful little creation is a Pelikan design and it is really REALLY clever with a wonderful laugh out loud moment when the secret is discovered. The team has made it using Mahogany, Walnut and magnets…LOTS of magnets and really REALLY strong ones too. Don’t put this near your pacemaker! They have made some lovely slipfeathers and an engraved spiral on top to make it even more pretty. The aim, obviously, is to open the box. Bear in mind that I am really bad at boxes (I have several sequential discovery boxes sitting in my kitchen annoying Mrs S because I have failed to find any moves at all). Reading this paragraph there are a whole lot of "really's" in it but this puzzle needs all of them! 

I discovered the first step of this puzzle quite quickly which is how I knew there were magnets. Once this discovery is past you then it’s time to play with what you have found. You do this by feel and intuition and have to try and understand why things inside seem to be flipping over and back at times. The odd thing is it just all feels rather random. You need to keep at it for a while and all of a sudden there is a change and you’ve opened it. I would guess that most people will open it mostly by chance and then laugh and then play with the open box mechanism for a while to understand what you did and work out a cleaner quicker way to do it. I can now open and re-lock it in a matter of a minute now that I understand the clever mechanism. I must say that I have never seen anything like it before.

It took me a whole week to open it and I’ve been playing with it for a few hours now and it still makes me smile when I look at the mechanism. This is stunning.

Little Tetra Flop

Little Tetra Flop by Dr Volker Latussek

This fabulous new challenge from Dr Volker Latussek continues the wonderful Flop series but showing that he can now see the benefits of the side holes over the loss of purity from an incomplete box.

Pelikan has created this beauty out of Wenge and American Cherry, keeping the 4x1 piece outside of the box (which is 4x3x2 voxels with a 1½ voxel deep entry postbox on top).

The first challenge is to work out how to remove the pieces from the box. As we all know Volker designs both the puzzle and the delivery conformation to be a challenge and this one really takes it to the max - it took me a good 30 minutes to get all the pieces free. I love this aspect of these puzzles. Having taken them out, you now have 6 of the usual set of tetrominoes to put back in using the trademark flop moves.

First thing to do is find the possible assemblies of which there are 14. Obviously the restricted entry helps limit the numbers and you also need to decide whether Volker would stoop so low as to use the side hole of the box to place the last piece. So how should you go about narrowing down the assemblies? I got slightly lucky and managed it after a few hours of trying random positions before realising that the most important thing to do was to leave enough space for the insertion of the pieces that can only be rotated into the box.

The Aha! moment is wonderful with this puzzle. It’s yet another example of Volker’s genius mind. It’s not too horrendous and very very clever. Having solved it, I then had to try and find the delivery assembly all over again. Brilliant fun!

Centrifuge

Centifuge by Lucie Pauwels

This lovely little challenge from Lucie Pauwels has been made in a gorgeous red grained Merbau and a very white contrasting Ash. It consists of a square frame surrounding a 3x3x3 hole to be filled with the unusually shaped pieces. There are holes in each other the 4 walls of the frame which need to be filled once the pieces are packed.

I spent a good 15 minutes trying to construct a 3x3x3 cube which could fit inside before I sheepishly came to the realisation that a) this was impossible and b) would make the holes in the frame totally superfluous. Having had my eejit moment I then looked at constructing the shapes that would fit inside. This is a nice intuitive challenge because the pieces have ½ voxels sliced off in strategic places which really narrows down the possible arrangements. Obviously it is important that none of the ½ voxels are visible from above or below or in the holes and this adds to the challenge.

Very clever solution

This is not terribly tough but the sequence is clever and the aha! moment is very nice. It’s especially good if you don’t waste your time trying to do the impossible!

Shiba Inu

Shiba Inu (Limba version)

Garapa version - deliberately not showed off the shape of the dog

Here we have a couple of challenges in one from the amazing Girish Sharma. It’s a 6 piece burr with a single solution (no key piece) and then a 7 piece burr with the addition of the little dog inside the burr. Jakub and team have created two versions of this one. One made from a gorgeous Garapa and the other from a beautifully grained Limba. These are sent out as assembly challenges which will cause you some significant difficulty.

You would think that I, as a self confessed burr lover, would find this easy, but you’d be completely wrong. I may adore burrs (especially those that are part of the burr zoo) but I am awful at assembling them from scratch. I’m more of a puzzler who works to disassemble them and gain a muscle memory to help with reassembly (or I resort to Burrtools). I have multiple burrsets and yet still struggle to assemble a standard 6 piece burr - especially if the level is greater than 1 (hence the key piece comment). I started work on this one morning and it took me a whole 2 days to find even one assembly of the 6 piece burr. I was only able to do it because the solution that I found had a level 1.2 solution (i.e. it had a key piece that didn’t look like a solid key piece). Yes, I had found the simplest possible assembly of the 6 piece burr. Once I disassembled it and set the pieces out on a table in the correct orientation, I realised that there was no space inside for the doggie. There must be at least one more assembly that has a different interior cavity. It had taken me 2 days just to find one simple one - this was going to be a puzzle for Burrtools.

Not quite there!

Just the 6 piece burr assembled

Luckily I love making BT files and this was a nice easy one. The fabulous computer program showed me that there were 14 solutions to the 6 piece burr and only one of them was able to contain the dog. There was no way I would find the assembly myself so I used BT to tell me which burr sticks went where and after a good few hours managed to assemble the complete 7 piece burr. There is a nice little surprise for you when you do get it together (no spoiler here though).

Lisa and Lottie

Lisa and Lottie by Dr Volker Latussek

Remove the pieces this way

This incredible piece of puzzle analysis by Dr Latussek is definitely one for the collection of the hard-core puzzler. It is not for the faint-hearted - it is difficult…really REALLY difficult! The Pelikan team have made this exquisite puzzle from Bubinga with an Elm box.

Unusually for one of Volker’s creations it is sent out completely assembled in the box. The entry hole seems much much larger than the usual we have seen for the Flop series which gave me hope…until I tried to take them out of the box. I managed to take 4 of them out and then got stuck - are there rotations? No matter what I tried, I could not rotate any of the remaining pieces at all. This was very odd. Jakub never makes mistakes like this so I had a closer look and I then noticed that one of the sides of the boxes was removable. Once I had actually seen all the pieces, I had a bit of a panic! There were a lot of pieces and they were quite complex.

Volker said this about the puzzle:

“_Some of my puzzles start with a complete set of pieces, for each of which I have looked for a matching box to formulate a packing problem. Published examples of this are YIN YANG (6), TETRA-FLOP (8) and today LISA AND LOTTIE (10).
For LISA AND LOTTIE, Toshiaki Betsumiya had already proposed a complete set of ten pieces with GEMINI in 1987, each consisting of two half cubes (0.5x1x1) with a common contact area of at least one quarter (0.5x0.5). A few years ago, I initially asked myself which eight pieces could be packed into the cube-shaped box (2x2x2) of CASINO. At that time, I had to find the answer with the help of a self-written Fortran program in order to be able to present the BOX (2.5x2x2) for the ten pieces today.
There are 25 ways to build a corresponding cuboid (2.5x2x2), but only one way to put the pieces through the opening - which is the reason why I asked Pelikan to make a small batch of LISA AND LOTTIE. The uniqueness of the solution is very surprising to me, as I assumed there was no solution, even though the opening (1.5x2) is impressively large.
If you are willing to look at the ten pieces and how they interact, you will find the solution. Along the way, you can store the ten pieces in the box. _”

All ways to join 2 1x2x2 tetrominoes

This meant that if I could find one of the 25 possible cuboid assemblies then at least I could get it back inside. Off I went on my search. So far I have been totally unable to assemble even a cuboid to put back through side of the box, let alone find a way to put them all in through the hole in the top. I made a BT file for this one and found that the assembly in the box is not possible without some rotations so even if you do cheat a little bit then there is still going to be a huge challenge for you - there are 25 assemblies and 4 possible orientations of each to try. 100 possibilities even with the actual assembly shown is definitely a massive task. I am saving this for when I have a LOT of time on my hands. This is an incredible piece of puzzle analysis and something for the true puzzler.

Open Frame

Open Frame by Lucie Pauwels

This is a second of these amazing challenges by Lucie Pauwels to match the Minimal Frame from the last release. Like its' predecessor, it is a very colourful 2D packing puzzle with multiple different woods combined with an anti-slide puzzle using a very minimal frame but this time the edges of the frame are formed by single voxel pieces in the centre of each side (unlike the last one which had only 2 corner pieces). There are 9 pieces to be fit inside the 7x7 square. There is an overlap between the two puzzles with some shared pieces but the very simple ones are different.

Close but not there

I went to work and yet again, realised that tray packing puzzles are very difficult for me. I did manage after an hour or so to find a single assembly. It is oddly difficult to place these pieces into such an open tray. Like the Minimal frame, I was able to get many not quite there solutions but actually making the complete square shape proved very tough. The solution I found was satisfying but it did not fulfil the anti slide requirement. There are 2 pieces in the puzzle which must be oriented in a certain way to prevent them slipping out an edge or you must find a way to confine them to the interior of the assembly shape. 

A quick resort to Burrtools showed me that there are 15 possible assemblies of the square but only one of them is also anti-slide. I won’t show the final solution but once you look at it, it is a marvellous thing to behold! This is a huge challenge and very attractive! If you have the Minimal Frame then you owe it to yourself to get this one to go with it.

X-Ray

X-Ray byBenjamin Heidt

This beautiful creation made from Wenge, Purpleheart and Maple is the sixth of the puzzles from Jakub designed by Benjamin Heidt. Like most of his designs there is always something different and clever about them and this is no exception. It looks like a standard 6 piece burr made with tubular burr sticks, except there are 10 sticks in total, with 4 of them split into 2 halves. It is designed so that you can see right through it to work out what is going on inside, hence the name. Being based on a 12x12x12 grid it might give you an idea that there could be some rather involved movements and you wouldn't be wrong. My initial exploration managed to move the pieces a long way apart whilst still interlocked and nowhere to go.

Almost there? Not a chance!

Interestingly, there are very few blind ends in dismantling this one and those that there are, are relatively short. The challenge here is to find the pathway. The hollow nature of the sticks means that you can see almost everything but despite this I got blocked on numerous occasions. Part of the reason for this is the rather sharp internal edges which need very precise alignment but once you think that you can see a move, stick with it, make sure it's all aligned correctly and it goes very smoothly. Whilst the level is a pleasant 14.2.3.2.1.1.1.2, it is a really good challenge to effectively work your way through the maze. I find that for complex burrs the teens and twenties is just about right for an enjoyable experience.

Brilliant clever design

These wonderful puzzles should go on sale at Pelikan's website on Wednesday, 13th November at 10am CET (9am GMT, 4am EST & 1am PST). Whilst you are there, there are still a few copies of the wonderful Sukiyaki which I reviewed here and Benjamin's incredible Steam Boat which I reviewed here.

A Less Than Relaxing Holiday!

Latest Pelikan release

I get an inkling that trouble is in the air about 2 weeks ago when I see a beautiful puzzle on Jakub's Facebook page and I realise that it has been about 2 months since the last batch went on sale. I show it to "she who frightens the gods" and rather than admonish me about the catastrophe that isms study and the sheer number of puzzles lying around, she reminds me that we are on going on holiday quite soon and this might make deliveries a little awkward. Just to get at her, Jakub arranges for a delivery to arrive at PuzzleMad HQ literally 48 hours before we are due to head off to Sconny Botland (that's Bonny Scotland to the foreigners) for a little hard earned relaxation (and a visit to the outlaws 😱). OMG! What am I to do? I have 8 rather bulky puzzles and I cannot fit them all in my luggage. To make things even more fraught, Jakub tells me that he wants to release them on 20/09 and I will not even be back home then. He is happy for me to write my reviews after they have gone on sale - Phew! I pack as many as I can stuff into a little rucksack much to the disgust of "she who makes me quake in fear".

Whilst away, I attempt to plough through them with only limited success and manage a couple more when I got back home. In the meantime a couple of them sell out in record time even without my wise words extolling their virtues - I might even be superfluous.

So here we go:

Minimal Frame

Minimal frame by Lucie Pauwels

Nope!

This gorgeous compact puzzle has already sold out I'm afraid (hopefully Jakub and Jaroslav will agree to make another batch). It is a very simple looking packing puzzle by the incredibly talented Lucie Pauwels. It consists of a number of pieces to be fitted into a frame...a vey minimal frame with only 2 cubies. It has all the lovely woods - Maple, Zebrano, Ash, Purpleheart, Wenge, American Walnut, Jatoba, Acacia & Padauk. It is obviously a packing puzzle where the 9 pieces need to be assembled into a square where they form a 7x7 square. This alone is quite a tough challenge. The complexity of the shapes does give a little help as certain pieces seem to scream to be together and the odd missing voxel in some assembled shapes scream to abut the single corners in the frame. Playing with this is very disconcerting as you race ahead with a nice promising shape and hopefully reach the final 2 or 3 pieces and realise that Lucie has led you astray - the last couple of pieces won't fit.

After a couple of days later I finally have it and all the pieces are fitting in. Except I haven't actually solved it - there are 39 solutions (why did it take me so long?) but the true aim is to construct the square in such a way that all the pieces are held captive and cannot just slide out sideways. Only one of the 39 assemblies fulfils this criterion - if you get a chance to try this it will need a lot of planning!

The Hoffman Suite

The Hoffman Suite by Dr Volker Latussek

I am afraid that this suite of 4 very complex packing puzzles has also already sold out. These are not for the fainthearted - if another batch are made then they are only for expert packing puzzlers. It's an odd name for puzzles if your name is not Hoffman and Volker explains himself as follows:

"I really wanted to realize the HOFFMAN SUITE according to Dean G. Hoffman’s 1978 problem using golden cuboids. However, the sum of the side lengths of the golden ratio 1.000 x 1.618 x 2.618 yields 4.236 which is greater than the 4.000 specified by Hoffman. Wanting to preserve the harmony of the golden ratio, I considered their square root: 1.000 x 1.272 x 1.618. At 3.890, their sum is less than 4.000 and they fulfil the Pythagorean theorem (as 1.000 x 1.000 + 1.272 x 1.272 = 1.618 x 1.618), which is indispensable for rotations in restricted boxes. The basic building block for the HOFFMAN SUITE is found and considering its inherent harmony, I’ve named the four packing problems after the four movements of Edvard Grieg’s 1888 Peer Gynt Suite."

This whole idea frightened me a lot! I bought the Hoffman packing puzzle from Tom Lensch several years ago and to this day have not solved it - I assembled it using the instructions and have had some correspondence giving me helpful hints but I am too dopey to be able to solve such a complex packing puzzle.

I include a pic of the original - as you can see, it is stunning and impossibly difficult!

Hoffman Suite I - Morning Mood

Here we have an unrestricted cubic box with 6 identical shapes, each consisting of the three basic blocks. I figured this one might actually be achievable by a packing eejit like me and took it with me on holiday. I hoped that it might be like a few other cubic packing puzzles where a sort of rotational symmetry was required and it would just be a matter of working out how to place pieces in a circle around the centre. Take my advice and ignore that - the solution is very clever and requires a good bit of thought based on the sizes of the blocks. I did manage to solve it after 3 days of trying!

Hoffman Suite II - The Death of Ase

Again an unrestricted cubic box but with 8 different shapes to pack in, each consisting of three basic blocks. 

Volker said: "This design came from my investigation of how many corner columns of three basic blocks are required for a unique filling. I had initially reckoned on 6, but haven’t been able to find them so far, and a filling with 7 corner columns has also eluded me. This packing problem is aptly named and should probably be avoided."

Probably be avoided? OMG!  With the clue of corner columns, I altered my approach and tried to pack the pieces into columns as tightly as they would go and actually found the solution entirely by chance. Let's just say this is difficult and leave it at that!

Hoffman Suite III - Anitra's Dance

I have not yet played with this one and suspect that it will be beyond a puzzle with my meagre abilities - I am sure that you geniuses out there will solve it easily!

Volker said this: "A restricted cubic box with 5 equal parts, each consisting of three basic blocks. Here too you’ll find your mind and your eyes playing tricks on you. Oh, and there may be some interlocking rotations."

Not only is it a restricted complex packing but it requires rotations - aargh!

Hoffman Suite IV - In the Hall of the Mountain King

Also not attempted - in fact I am too frightened to remove all the blocks from the container!

Volker said: "A restricted cubic box with 27 basic blocks. Despite the seemingly infinite number of pieces(!), the solution can be derived. The impatient can use the 21 published solutions of the HOFFMAN PUZZLE as a guide (one of which is the initial filling) – so don’t just pour out the blocks because you can learn a lot and the folks at Pelikan have filled the 27 basic blocks into the box with a lot of love."

Fabrick

Fabrick by Lucie Pauwels

Lucie not only does wonderful packing puzzles with a complex twist...she also designs interlocking puzzles that have a certain "je ne said quoi". The Fabrick puzzle is available in two versions - the one above is Ovangkol and Limba and it is also available in vibrant Purpleheart and Maple. It consists of 8 distinctly different puzzle pieces constructed in two layers with a framed tray with the aim being to assemble the pieces to form a woven pattern with the two colours forming parallel lines in each direction. It looks absolutely horrific at first glance but the constraints of the shape required and the colouring of the pieces make this a nice logical puzzle. A little trial and error reveals a set of constraints that limit where the pieces can interact and after this the assembly is a nice progression ending with a very satisfying aha!

Aim for this - it's tough but solvable!

Steam Boat

Steam Boat by Benjamin Heidt

The Steamboat burr is stunningly gorgeous! It is made from vibrant Padauk with Wenge and Cherry. Obviously the aim is to disassemble it and then put it back together again. The first thing to notice is that there are 4 burr sticks vertically forming the ship's turrets and also 4 burr sticks across the hull of the ship. Initial thought is that these will all interact and eventually allow a sideways movement which will free one of the sticks from the assembly and then the rest will come out fairly easily after that. Of course, as happens so frequently to me, my initial thoughts are wrong! I found a few nice moves that seemed to make a good sequence and freed up a progressive ability to move the sticks. I was on a roll!

That is until after about 10 moves I could make no further progress. I went back and forth searching for a missed opportunity and could not for the life of me find it. It was time to think© and look very closely at what I had. Jakub and team have constructed this very very beautifully with something perfectly hidden. Only when you have made this discovery will you be able to search again for another critical move. Once you have found it then rapid progresses made and pieces come out quickly. The endgame is still not trivial and the final pieces need another set of steps to remove them.

If you concentrate and don't lose track of what goes where then an assembly might be possible from scratch. I, of course, bundled all the pieces together to take a photo and will need to resort to Burrtools to reassemble this one. It is a stunning design and will look fabulous on display.

Sukiyaki

Sukiyaki by Frederic Boucher

When I saw this in the bundle from Jakub, I wondered whether this was yet another Minima puzzle (Frederic has been very prolific with that series!) but this is MUCH more complex than those simple designs. It is a restricted entry packing puzzle but without the rotations required by the Minimas. It consists of a rather fun looking box (dimensions 2x3x4 voxels) with a rather large but complex opening in the top and a trio of holes in a couple of faces to allow movement of the pieces. These pieces are 4 identical S shaped tetrominoes and 2 extras with a half voxel missing (making them 2 mirror images). This half voxel is going to make the assembly and movements very interesting. It is an odd name for a puzzle and is the first in a series of 3 packing puzzles Frederic named after famous Japanese foods (SUKIYAKI, TAKOYAKI and TAIYAKI). I hope that the others in the series will also be made.

Jakub and team have created it beautifully from American Walnut and Maple. I have not had time to play with this one yet but if it is anything at all like the Minima puzzles that I have previously reviewed from both Pelikan and Tye Stahly then it is one that SHOULD be in your collection.

I still seem to have a fair bit of work to do to catch up - I have not even found the fist move with Shane's Who Dares Wins, I have not managed to solve any of the three 5-piece jigsaws and have received a couple of beauties from Tom Lensch recently which are sitting tantalising me!