Cast Jam

<Apologies for the hiatus: been feeling rubbish and not doing a huge amount of puzzling – and the little grey cells were definitely not up to writing anything vaguely coherent or passably amusing! I trust both of my readers enjoyed the break.>

Cast Jam is the latest little Hanayama gem designed by Yuu Asaka, the designer of several most excellent acrylic packing puzzles.

Cast Jam presents you with a silver medallion with a curved path engraved into each side and a pair of golden handles that clearly engage in the paths… there’s a single exit on each side of the medallion, and your goal is quite clearly to remove the handles and then return the puzzle to its starting position with the two handles locked in place back-to-back at the top of the medallion. (The handles each have a flat side that needs to be together…)

While the start position appears to be right at one of the exits, Sod’s Law dictates that the other handle is in the way, and there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to get it out of the way… which is interesting.

Start fiddling around with the handles and you’ll find that you can pretty much position them just about anywhere along the paths, but taking them to the other end just presents you with a similar conundrum: sure there’s an exit path, but the wrong handle is in front… 

Great! Time to Think (c).

Somewhere around this time I spotted something interesting in the paths, and I thought I was onto something – so I did a thing and found myself in a really interesting position, where all of a sudden the precise geometry of the non-flat side of the handle was very clearly deliberate, and stopping me from doing what I wanted… so I could get around some of the hurdles I came across, but there was always one stubborn hurdle that refused to yield.

I spent a while exploring this new space – and there’s a lot to explore! You can really do some pretty darned whacky things, and some of them felt really promising, but ultimately I kept coming back to the same spot… and it wasn’t an exit path. 

One thing I noticed was that the design of those two paths is sufficiently similar to keep lulling you into a sense of security that you’re looking at the right maze, when in fact you aren’t! (Is it just me, or has our designer been really sneaky?)

Yet more Think (c) was duly engaged – reserves are severely depleted at this stage.

Surely there must be a way to think about this as some sort of shunting problem… but the key feature you need for that to work, clearly doesn’t… which is interesting, he says again.

And he’s right, it is, and it turns out to be the key to the puzzle. Think it all through and examine things really carefully and a new possibility opens up – pleasingly still requiring all of the unusual discoveries from my side trip up the blind alley.

I really like Cast Jam because it’s an honest, open puzzle. Nothing’s hidden away in the innards – it’s all on display from the get-go… but I’ll wager you a (modest) puzzle that you won’t spot it for quite a while and when you do, you’ll smile at the guile of Asaka-san.  

[Thanks to Steve for yet-again grabbing me a copy of the very latest Hanayama puzzle to keep my collection topped up!]

Lewis Evans’ Gordian Knot

About a year ago Lewis asked if he could borrow my copy of Stickman’s Gordian Knot so I posted it down to him… a short while later it was back home again with Lewis saying he’d really enjoyed the solve and he’d done all the measuring and 3D modelling he needed to…. Given how quickly it returned, I was pretty sure that he’d been thoroughly scared off by the project. That was my first mistake.

A couple of months later there were a few more questions and the puzzle duly did another round trip to Lewis’ workshop – Lewis doesn’t scare easily, and in September he was ready to begin taking pre-orders and I wasn’t going to miss out on this one.

My copy arrived in mid-December and it looks brilliant… while the original is covered in a lattice of different coloured woods, Lewis’version is all in a single colour with a bunch of cast metal accents strategically placed about the faces. The single colour does a great job of hiding the connections between the pieces and makes the sides look far more similar and harder to differentiate. (I’m sure that wasn’t intentional!)

Finding the way in is tricky, there’s a lot to explore and only so much of it is actually useful… as I played with it memories of solving the original definitely provided some inspiration, but my memory turned out to be somewhat foggy and it ended up taking me a long time to get through to the reveal and what would have been the final step on the original… let’s just pause here for a moment and remind ourselves of just what an awesome reveal that is… you’re playing with an intricate box when all of a sardine you’re presented with something that makes sense of some stuff you’ve found earlier and you find yourself thinking “surely not?”… when indeed…

That bit of the solve literally blows everyone’s mind and it’s a wonderful thing to see the look in puzzlers’ eyes when they twig what’s about to happen… Lewis’ copy does that just as brilliantly…

But then there’s more….

Rather than being the rather wonderful end to the journey, Lewis provides just a pause, before the journey continues…!

I spent a very long time not making any progress at this stage – I was certain I knew what I wanted to happen – I just couldn’t get it to actually do anything… I tried a bunch of different things, some of them several times hoping for a different outcome (yes, yes…) and then last Sunday, I gave it to Ali partially solved and asked him to help me… and a short while later I saw him doing something I hadn’t – because, well, why would you? Except it was definitely having an impact, and a positive one at that…

Ali had it open soon after that and we examined the innards and it was very clear why what I was trying was never going to work and what Ali was clearly doing "wrong", was in fact exactly what was required…

Lewis has added a brilliant twist to the end of the original – the first part of the solution follows the original faithfully, and the last bit is just excellent.

Kudos to Lewis for taking on this project and making an already excellent puzzle even better, and then bringing a whole bunch of new copies into the community – the world definitely needs more than the original 28 Gordian Knots…