Burrr.exe ERROR

I reckon this one deserves a specific shout-out given just how innovative it is… spoiler alert: there might be a little repetition of some of my gushy praise from the last MPP write-up! You’ve been warned!

Adin has been designing puzzles for several years – he’s turned his hand to a wide variety of puzzles, from symmetry puzzles (one of which was included in my IPP34 exchange puzzle in London) to burrs (including Amulet, which attracted Eric’s attention and ended up in a 2017 Cubic Dissection release). While he’s been a little quieter on the puzzle scene over the past few years while he and Sophie have been looking after little Oren, it’s clear the bug hasn’t left him!

He'd been along to one or two MPP again recently and then a few months ago he started asking innocent questions about 3D printers because he’d had an idea for a puzzle that would work a lot better in 3D printing than in wood – bear with me! I know that sounds like blasphemy…

He talked to a few of us (mainly Steve!) and the inevitable result was that when a suitably discounted offer was open, he bought himself a Bambu printer… and I think it’s fair to say that he was pretty darn delighted with just how easy these things are to use these days – gone are the days of fettling and tuning for hours to get a successful print every n’th attempt – they really do just work now!

A couple of weeks later he was posting pictures of a weird looking experiment with a burr sticking out of a base at a pretty wonky angle – inviting puzzlers Excalibur-like to “Take me out if you dare!”. Dubbed “Burr.exe ERROR” it looks like some sort of an AI image experiment gone wrong… but here it was in real life…

I grabbed a copy from him at MPP and have to say he’s done an excellent job – for a bloke who only printed his first thing a month or two earlier – this is a great print of an excellent design… the text on the base is playfully offset – right off the base – and adds to the idea that something has gone horribly wrong in the process – to the point that you might prefer to reboot the universe (something that might be a grand idea with some of the weird stuff happening around the planet at the moment!).

The pale blue six-piece burr is well and truly trapped in the base – it’s clear what you need to do, and the base helpfully tells you this is (only!) a level 9 burr… and it’s a really great solve – it’s easy enough to find something that moves, and then some more, but there’s a wonderful little pause in the middle that catches a lot of folks out – in spite of it only being 9 moves to remove the first piece – it’s anything but trivial.

The base, and the angling of the burr is genius – it stops a whole heap of moves that would render the puzzle trivial and then he’s done some clever stuff inside there to make things a bit more interesting.

Sure you could describe this as just a burr in a simple cage that applies a few restrictions, but that’s missing the point. This is a burr that’s sunk into a base plate and made a terrific puzzle – who doesn’t love a little entropy in a puzzle design?

Take all the pieces out and you understand why certain things are blocked and just why the angle of the wonk is exactly what it is…

Putting it back together is probably the simpler of the steps because you know where things are, but it will still exercise the little grey cells a little.

I just really love the idea of this puzzle – and the actual mechanics / movement are pretty darn good as well… Adin is well and truly back on the puzzle-scene – welcome back, mate! We’ve missed you. :-)

Brass Monkey 5

The Two Brass Monkeys have literally just released their latest creation into the wild and I feel the need to write about it…

They sent me a pre-release copy a couple of weeks ago and after waiting patiently until I’d finished up at work, headed home (seems weird to actually be able to say that!) and worked through the usual evening regime of penance on the exercise bike and dinner, I was finally able to sit down and have a wee puzzle.

BM5 looks virtually just like every other BM in the series – with just the slightest little detailing around the ends enabling you to tell them apart from the others – a hole and a ring mark out BM5… the rest looks pretty much just like every other one: it’s a standard six-piece cylindrical burr.

…but if they were all alike, we’d have stopped buying them after about BM3… just to be sure, right?!

So far, every one of them has been pretty darn unique, so it’s sensible to start out with high expectations… treat it with respect, don’t let yourself get lulled into a false sense of security at having solved the first four in the series (you have, haven't you?)… approach it with some reverence… it won’t disappoint.

Anyway, back to the story of my solve… I tried all the usual things one tries on a burr – heck, I even tried some of the more unusual things one might try – I’ve learnt lessons from the first four BMs after all.

None of that seems to do anything useful whatsoever…

BM5 is a very worthy successor – and I suspect it will be the most surprising puzzle that you solve this year. (I’m assuming you do solve it this year… although I suspect that it might take some folks a little while before they stumble onto the best way of solving this particular little conundrum.)

I will tell you that when I did solve it I felt the need to hop straight onto a video call with the monkeys to share my amazement /amusement / gob-smack-ed-ness – this little puzzle has given me the biggest laugh out loud moment that I can remember - equal parts “A-Ha” and “A-Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

If it doesn’t delight and surprise you, please check your pulse…

 

Polar Burr

Many weeks ago, Steve included a copy of Derek’s latest helical burr in one of my regular care packages. Polar Burr is the product of Derek’s relentless research into all possible helical variants – this one comes with the dubious title of being the highest level helical burr to date… at somewhere over 30 moves to remove the first piece.

That probably won’t scare you – like me, you’ve probably been victorious over many level-30 burrs in your time. Heck, you’ve probably even done plenty of them with a lot more pieces than this one… and yet this one is very, very different! You should respect this one, even approach it with deference… and if you don’t, it will bite you on the bum – guaranteed.

Now I’ve acquired several helical variants over the years – and virtually all of them have been great fun. Sure they mess with your head a little when you start playing with them, but once you get used to the movements and the interactions and you start forming a mental picture of how the blockages and passages inside are interacting, you can almost picture a route through them… or you can just blindly fiddle and often that’ll be enough to take them apart. Of course blind luck is seldom sufficient for reassembly!

Polar Burr seriously ups the ante however… I must have spent hours over the course of several weeks trying to get the darn thing apart without making the lightest bit of progress. Sure, I could get the pieces to start coming apart – heck, I could get them to the point where they were literally hanging together by a thread – but get them totally apart? Nope – not a sausage.

Truth be told, if it hadn’t been for the kind offer of a BurrTools file from a fellow-puzzler, that thing would never have come apart. Even with the BurrTools file it’s a pretty tricky task! 

There are some wonderfully sneaky little moves in there that casual fiddling (my usual approach to solving puzzles!) will simply never find… so if you want a thoroughly serious helical burr, hit up the Two Brass Monkeys for a copy of Polar Burr – but please don’t blame me if your vocabulary gets a lot more colourful than it ever used to be as a result.

Derek 1 – Allard 0

Juno's Crooked Six-Piece Burrs

Somewhere around the tail-end of December Juno released a few new puzzles on Pluredro and I wasn’t quite quick enough to pick up a copy of each, but I did manage to get a pair of the Crooked 6 Piece Burrs… which I thought was great.

Juno had released a remake of his original Crooked 6 Piece Burr along with a slightly souped-up pinned version…

 and while they may look alike, there is really no comparison between them at all.

The one is a polite, genteel puzzle that rewards some analysis and behaves like an absolute gentleman throughout the entire solving process. The other is a wolf in sheep’s clothing out to mug you and take your last shred of dignity – you’ve been warned.

The original one is the gentleman here. Taking it apart is a nice, predictable affair, and scrambling the pieces provides a gentle, relaxing solve. The piece shapes may be more than a little confusing – it certainly took me a while to get my head around how things were inter-related, but once you’ve mentally switched gears and got yourself thinking around corners, you’ll be fine!

There’s a little analysis of the pieces and then some logic required to decide how you’re going to try and reassemble the little guy – but pay it enough respect and it rewards without a lot of protest…

As I’ve said, it’s a delightful puzzle.

The pinned version is a different kettle of fish altogether.

Start playing around with the pinned version and it’s immediately clear that it ain’t going to come apart nearly as easily as the original version… those little pins in the name are there to claw on for dear life as you try and take the little guy apart – and while it isn’t tremendously tough to work out how to take it apart, it will absolutely kick you in the teeth in the process.

No matter how carefully you proceed, this little illegitimate child (see, PG friendly references!) is going to fly apart in a million pieces when you really don’t want it to. I was warned, and I proceeded carefully, and I still made use of some rather colourful language when it all let go rather spectacularly and gave me a messed-up pile of pieces.

And that’s the easy part… 

... the really hard part is putting the thing back together again… this time you’ll literally be finding those pins fighting you all of the way, trying to keep the jolly pieces apart – it is uncanny!

Playing with the original version is like a gentle game of chess with an old friend.

Playing with the pinned version is like the wildest rollercoaster ride you’ve ever taken – heaps of adrenaline along the way and you’re really glad when it’s all over!

Choose your poison carefully.

Juno's SDBB Master

Juno’s latest well-telegraphed release of an epic sequential discovery puzzle (the Sequential Discovery Burred Box – Master, to give it its Sunday name) resulted in a bit of a deluge at the appointed hour, sadly crushing his web-site under the weight of stacks of eager puzzlers wanting to shower him in PayPal for the chance to test their wits. Unfortunately it took his web server quite a while to recover and as result some transactions ended up taking many hours… so having a young dog that is still getting you up in the middle of the jolly night for a quick wander around the back yard turns out to be a good thing on this particular night… she times it right, and I manage to snag a copy of Juno’s latest masterpiece.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and I’m ripping open the well-packaged puzzle and thinking to myself that this is definitely one of my largest six-piece burrs… it is a big, handsome brute of a puzzle. From a distance you might think it’s “just a six-piece burr”. Pick it up and start playing with it and you’re left in no doubt whatsoever that this is a heck of a lot more puzzle than it might seem.

The first thing you notice when you explore which bits might be able to move, is that there are interesting things hidden on the insides that you can’t see when it’s in its starting position. If you start disassembling things, you’ll find some very interesting movements in there before you manage to get all six pieces separated – for, yes, dear reader, there are indeed six pieces to this burr… however, that is only really the beginning of this epic quest.

The fun really starts now!

From here on in, you’re in serious sequential discovery land… you’ll find tools galore and challenges aplenty, and sometimes you’ll be wondering which way to go next, but one thing I can tell you is that every single mechanism you encounter has a beautifully elegant solution to it… something I discovered the hard way because the first time I worked through the puzzle I found myself at “the end” and realising that I still had a locked compartment – which is weird… so I retraced my steps and realised that I’d unintentionally bodged one of the stages and applied a somewhat agricultural approach to opening a compartment – a little time Think(c)ing and I found a far more elegant solution, which then resulted in the perfect tool for the next step and my Yin and Yang were once again in perfect harmony.

Trust me - this isn't a spoiler!

Since that first time, I’ve gone back over the solution again and again and really marvelled at the clever design that’s gone into creating so many different locking mechanisms – each one unique, and each one requiring some serious lateral thinking.

In a wonderfully witty twist, Juno’s description of the puzzle tells you that he’s placed a little infinity symbol in the last compartment so that you’ll know that you’ve reached the end ;-) – and also in my case so that you’ll know if you’ve done things wrong and cooked the solution! There’s a lovely progression through the different compartments with some very interesting tools along the way – sometimes they’re quite obvious, and sometimes you really do need you apply the little grey cells to imagine what might be required.

I’m very chuffed to have managed to snag one of these – I’ve even forgiven Barkley for all those trips around the garden in the rain in the middle of the night! This puzzle made that all worthwhile – it really is another classic from Juno – another one to be mighty proud of, Juno!

And if you didn’t manage to get one of your own, make sure you make friends with someone who did and play with their copy! Or better still, come along to an MPP if we ever hold one in the real world ever again and play with one of our copies!

SPOILER ALERT: Kevin’s a big fan too!