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!]