A couple of weeks back I plucked up the courage to drop a few leading lights in the puzzling community an email asking them whether they had any puzzles in stock – one of those was Jerry McFarland ... I’d come across his web-site some time ago and had marvelled at some the equipment that Jerry has in his workshop – clearly he’s serious about making stunning puzzles.
As luck would have it, Jerry didn’t have the puzzles I was after (and in fairness that’s what his web-site was saying too, but I asked anyway!) but he mentioned that he was putting together a new puzzle of his own design and asked if I’d be interested.
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About a week later a box arrived from Jerry containing a Lovely Burr (I’ll get to that one when I’ve worked out how the heck to get it apart!), a nicely made 5 sided cube and a bag of bits ... object of the Burrcube#1 is to decant bag of bits into box ... but there’s effectively only one way to do that, and the photo that Jerry had of the completed puzzle in the cube deliberately shows you the least useful side ... nice guy, that Jerry!
Usual disclaimer – I’d already told Jerry that I wasn’t the world’s best burr solver and that I wasn’t a big fan of packing problems that relied on brute force – when I said that, he added that someone called Cutler (yes, HIM!) had played around with the first prototype and enjoyed it and solved it using analysis ... so I'm thinking I’m going to enjoy this...
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You’ll recognise a number of similar pieces and they’ll help you come up with the guts of the solution, and from there it’s really a bit of experimentation to find the right combinations of bits. Thankfully there aren’t any curve-balls like some burrs, where you end up holding the last piece with no apparent means of getting it into the remaining assembly! Right up to the end, you can go backwards and forwards and add in bits...
All in all, it is a lovely little puzzle – it took about 20 minutes of gentle playing and experimentation to find a solution and it shows some lovely patterns on the sides as a result of the three different woods – as I said, the most boring one is the one that Jerry’s using to display the puzzle so as to give you as few clues as possible to the solution...
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If he does start selling them, please encourage him to make some more and expand on his ideas... the world doesn’t have enough puzzles yet... :-)
Nice review Allard and an interesting new puzzle... in a series hopefully!
ReplyDeleteHi Allard
ReplyDeleteDropped Jerry an Email this week to see what he has available and he is offering these puzzles as now available for purchase - have ordered one off him for the reasonable price he is asking. So thanks for the review.
KB64