Konstrukt

Yavuz Demirhan’s Konstrukt is a burr for non-burristas (like me!). 

It’s a combination of a simple three board burr in the centre with an interlocking cage surrounding it. The cage is made up of twelve identical pieces (albeit in three colours to make it look pretty - really pretty!) that rely on the internal board burr to actually stay together.

My copy came direct from Jakub at the New Pelikan Workshop after I spotted a pic of it online and then saw a copy in the flesh – it looks brilliant – especially given the colours of the woods that Jakub and the guys have used.

As a take-apart puzzle it’s pretty straight-forward – there’s only one or two things you can move initially … make some space and you can take the first piece out, then the rest follow in pretty quick succession – leaving you with the internal board burr that comes apart in the usual manner. 

Reassembly is only really slightly trickier. You start with the board burr and then work out how the cage pieces need to lie against the boards in order to achieve the target shape and not interfere with one another (now there’s a thought for you to conjure with!). 

Once you’ve got the basics sorted in your mind, it’s just a case of starting somewhere sensible and building it up from there … although, there is one little thing that might catch you out, as it caught me out, if you aren’t thinking far enough ahead…

A fun assembly for neophytes that ends up looking reasonably impressive.

Chen’s Six Board Burr #2

Designed by Chi-Ren Chen, this innocuous-looking board burr has a couple of interesting little twists to it. 

A few months ago Eric posted some early pics of his prototypes on his Facebook page and there was a chorus of approval from the peanut gallery – while all the approval was going on he wondered aloud whether he should make the pieces with splined ends for some added strength, and a whole lot of extra good looks. Several of us piled in and encouraged him to add splines, even though they’d invariably add a little to the cost – and probably quite a bit of extra work! :-)

A couple of days later a splined version appeared and it was indeed rather a good-looking piece of work ... in the interests of science, Eric then went and slung a 45 lbs weight on the one end of it and posted a picture of this poor little innocent puzzle piece with a massive lump of iron trying to rip it apart – and the piece held its own – so the point was made, the splined version of the burr is pretty darn strong! 

My copy arrived with the other recent batch from Cubic Dissection neatly disassembled in a little plastic baggy – gee thanks! The pieces are made of walnut, ash and African mahogany, with the splines each on a contrasting wood. 

Eric’s description notes that it’s a level 2.14.12 burr that is “more approachable than the level may seem” – the level is rather odd really, with the assembled puzzle shedding its first pieces after a mere two moves, while the next piece takes 14 moves to release, and a further 12 are required to get the next one off before it becomes a trivial matter. 

Eric’s encouragement is well-placed – if you were to bash the pieces into BurrTools and look for a solution, you might be disappointed – because, as PuzzleWillBePlayed.com notes, rotations are required... so you have no choice really! 

I had a look at the pieces, decided that the colours needed to be together in pairs (huge logical leap me? – Nah, that’s what Eric’s pics show!) – Handily, there are two identical pairs of pieces which makes placement in the solution a lot simpler ... and there’s a piece that would work quite nicely at the end to give that first two-move piece-removal, while actually locking everything else together, so I’d more or less decided where the pieces needed to go with that little thought process alone – in fact, if you add one further constraint: don’t waste space as you go, you can pretty much find a unique target assembly – the tricky bit is then just to work out how to get there.  

I started fiddling around fairly aimlessly and found that the tolerances between the pieces were pretty incredible – when you’re assembling board burrs you’re invariably sliding one piece over a set of other pieces – and if you don’t have all the pieces properly aligned and absolutely square, you’re not going to get anything to move ... so much for the comment on PuzzleWillBePlayed.com that if the edges are rounded, short-cuts are possible. No short-cuts are possible on Eric’s version!

I started with one pair of pieces and pretty much used those as a frame of reference all the way through – while trying to work out how to get the other three pieces into their places in order to allow the last piece to be inserted the way I’m guessing it has to ... that process took a fair amount of trial and error as well as experimentation to work out what order they needed to go in and how you could manipulate them in order to free up the space to do what you need to do next. 

If you’re more used to playing with well-behaved orthogonal burrs, that process can all seem rather unstructured and chaotic, but combined with Eric’s fine tolerances, you always know when something is supposed to work (it fits, just) and when it shouldn’t... 

In the end, it probably took me the best part of an hour to suss out the order, orientation and then the manoeuvres required to construct it – and I was actually rather chuffed with myself for managing that given that it’s way outside of my usual comfort zone. 

It’s a fun little burr that looks like it should be really simple, but it’ll definitely provide plenty of amusement for almost every puzzler. 

Eric has produced a gorgeous version to fantastic tolerances – and the splines really make this one stand out

A couple of interesting finds...

Back in December at Peter Hajek’s EPP (don’t worry, I think I’m running out of excuses for continually referring back to this one!) a couple of the guys there had brought along some spare puzzles they were interested in trading or bartering – and as I’m rather new to this whole puzzle-collecting thing, I don’t really have any puzzles I want to get rid of yet, let alone have any spares or duplicates, so when I spotted something interesting, I was forced to resort to the puzzlers' lowest common denominator: cash. 

I did spot a couple of interesting puzzles in one of the crates and managed to strike a deal with their former owner, and as a result I managed to add a couple of interesting (even if only to me!) Japanese puzzles to my little hoard.

The first was a Six Board Burr that Jun-Ichi Yananose used as his exchange puzzle at IPP16 in Luxembourg. It’s a big, chunky, brute of a puzzle made in thick plywood that came in what looked like the original plastic bag from 1996 along with its information sheet. The information sheet is delightful – pointing out that the solution is not supplied, but coyly admitting that if you ask him for the solution, he’ll show you how to solve the puzzle as long as you keep the solution to yourself. [He also pokes fun at his name, pointing out it’s an anagram of “As anyone”.] 

The actual puzzle itself is listed on Ishino’s site as Board Burr #2 and the design dates back to 1991. It’s a reasonably mainstream board burr with no weird little tricks or rotations thrown in (unlike BB#1 and BB#3) and while the pieces are accurately made, I wouldn’t describe them as particularly good looking – so at first glance it might look like a bit of an ugly duckling among some of the lovely hardwood pieces from the likes of Rob, Eric or Jerry – but this puzzle has history to it – this was one of Yananose’s early exchange puzzles and he’s turned into somewhat of a burr designing legend – so I like the fact that I have a copy of one of his very early burrs – one that he chose to show off his own designs... 

The second item I spotted was a Nob Yoshigahara design called For your own sake made by Hikimi. I recognised the puzzle from a puzzle auction listing and thought it looked quite cute. Nob designed a set of puzzles based around the traditional wooden sake cup (masu) and used them to great effect as the basis for several packing puzzles and even a hidden maze or two. 

 

For your own sake is a packing puzzle with a bit of a twist. You have 6 L-shaped pieces to place into the masu ... along with three marbles – two yellow and one green if you’re interested. When you first open the box, the green marble is sitting proud half out of a piece in the centre of the box and the two yellow marbles are nowhere to be seen until you tip the pieces out. The L-shaped pieces have a series of half-spheres cut into them, so that if you place two of these holes next to one another, you can hide a marble in the hole ... and the object of the puzzle is to pack all the pieces in the masu such that all marbles are hidden. 

OK – so we have 6 L-shaped pieces to pack into two 3*3 layers – and we know that all of the holes need to be facing another hole (there aren’t any spare holes – that would just be mean ... evil laugh heard in puzzle design shop in the distance...) and moreover they all need to be internal – which should narrow things down quite a lot ... should be simple, except master Yoshigahara has gone and placed the holes in particular spots – probably not intentionally to make it hard to solve, that’s probably just a fortuitous unintended consequence! In fairness, it’s not horribly difficult – even I managed to find a solution without the help of my usual tool of choice – although I did use it to confirm that there are 8 solutions available. 

Cute little puzzle that really stands out with the green marble perched in the centre of the box inviting you to pack it away properly.

Triplets

I managed to pick up a couple of relatively modest unusual puzzles on the latest round of Cubic Dissection auctions. One of them was a very plain looking puzzle designed by Jim Gooch called Triplets. This particular one was made in Zebra Wood by Puzzlecraft. 

Perhaps I’m being a bit unfair by calling it plain-looking – but it looks like a simple common-or-garden three piece burr. However, there’s a clue in the name to the fact that this one’s a little different, and a quick glance over at Puzzles will be played – confirms that this puzzle consists of three identical pieces with a rather unconventional shape. 

The oddly shaped pieces are totally disguised when the puzzle is assembled, leaving an unwary puzzler spending half their time pulling or pushing pieces against themselves – evil grin ...

In terms of burr- complexity, this one is about as simple as they get – two moves to remove the first piece and there are only three pieces anyway – but the shape of the pieces will throw anyone who hasn’t seen one of these before off the scent for quite a while ... really cute little puzzle for amusing folks who think they’ve seen one of these before...