Compressed and Round Trip by Gregory Benedetti

Greg’s burr designs have never been accused of being similar to other designs – Greg’s designs stand out! In their solved states, some of them may look reasonably conventional, but that’s just a ruse to lull you into a false sense of security…

Back in Washington D.C. his Blind Burr kicked my backside very thoroughly when I tried to solve it in the Design Competition room… and I was delighted when I finally worked it out. The Ambigram Burr changed the rules quite a bit and his Glued and Welded burrs are just the thing to inflict on someone who reckons that a burr is a burr is a burr… 

At last year’s IPP Greg came up with another new take on burr design – he’d dubbed it New Old-School (or NOS) and the pieces had a rather distinctive look about them… with a few diagonal cuts it was clear these pieces were meant to slide along one another in pretty unusual ways. He’d had a few of his new designs 3D-printed and was handing them around for puzzlers to have a bash at… and one evening I spent a good hour or so trying to assemble what Greg assured me was the simplest of the ones he had there… I didn’t feel particularly bright as the others were all solving them far quicker than I was… 

One of the other people showing a fair amount of interest in those designs at IPP35 was Eric Fuller, so when he announced that he’d made up a few copies of two of Greg’s NOS designs I didn’t hang about… and they are every bit as good as I hoped they’d be!

NOS 1 is also known as Compressed – Eric’s made these in maple and done a great job of making them look like standard six-piece burrs… of course they don’t behave like standard six-piece burrs, but that’s half the fun of them! 

Start fiddling with this one and you can actually get one or two pieces to appear to move in a pretty standard manner… it doesn’t seem to help, but it is a little comforting! 

Experiment a little more and you’ll find pieces start interacting, and then things start getting really funky! Soon enough you’ll have pieces heading in all sorts of different directions and shortly after that you’ll find you have a hand-full of pieces! 

Well done… now all you have to do is reassemble them – Good luck!

[Actually, with only two types of pieces it’s not too difficult but seems a bit fiddly the first few times… but rest assured – there’s a reasonably simple strategy for putting them all back together again that doesn’t require an extra pair of hands and the skills of a circus contortionist!] 

…and I’m willing to bet that you’ll be rather surprised at the final move-count… after all the other interesting things you tried to do with those pieces earlier on in your journey… :-)

NOS 3 a.k.a. Round Trip is a lovely rich Padauk. Once again this is another wolf in sheep’s clothing – fiddle around and try to find the first move, and when you do, it is guaranteed to take you by surprise! Weird stuff happens – all by itself… this thing takes on a life of its own. 

…get past that first little surprise and then it sort of behaves itself – as long as you’re OK with multiple pieces moving all the time..

The first piece is released after a few moves, but the next takes quite a few more – and they’re quite interesting… until you manage to totally dismantle it and find the pieces are all unique – and if they don’t imbue you with great respect for Master Fuller’s craftsmanship, you aren’t paying attention. 

Putting this one back together again is a totally different challenge to NOS 1 … and provides a nifty exercise in logic. 

A couple of awesome Benedetti designs cleverly made by Fuller … hopefully there’ll be a lot more from that team – and you know it’ll be a wild ride if there is!

...and don't just take my word for it! Kevin really approves as well!!

Rotpack 1

My mate Adin has recently embarked on a bit of a journey into making and designing his own puzzles. Most folks who’ve bumped into me at a puzzle party recently will probably have been given a copy of his Symmple puzzle that is fiendishly difficult – he doesn’t do things in half-measures.

Similarly, when he started making puzzles in wood, he came up with his own design and made a beautiful copy which had me thoroughly stumped for the best part of one of his visits to me. 

(I managed to take it apart on his next visit … and promptly asked for a copy if he ever got around to making any more of them – it’s a very interesting design that looks nothing like a standard 6-piece burr – which is essentially what it is – it has a series of shoulders on the pieces which have different lengths on one of the axes and those shoulders remove many degrees of freedom and make for a really unusual solve.)

Anyhow, back to this story – Adin decided he wanted to make me a puzzle for my collection so he asked me what I wanted – cue brain going into overload and plenty of black smoke coming from the ears – what is the appropriate answer to an offer like that? We swapped a couple of emails and at one point I seriously embarrassed myself by asking for a copy of a particular Coffin cube that I was convinced I didn’t have, only for Adin to send me a link to my own blog reviewing said cube… suitably embarrassed I eventually settled on “something on Ishino’s site by Greg Benedetti” knowing that I only had a couple of his designs and Adin knew which ones I had (probably better than I did!).

Last week Adin arrived to collect a puzzle I’d brought back for him from DCD and he presented me with a copy of Benedetti’s Rotpack 1. Definitely one that I don’t have! It reminds me a bit of Tangler or Sun in that it consists of two pieces that combine to make the guts of a cube … and like both of those two, and several of Greg’s other designs – indeed referenced in its name, it requires rotations to assemble. (So long BurrTools!)

Adin had thoughtfully given it to me in two pieces with the comment that “it’s surprisingly tricky”. So I fiddled around with it while he and Sophie visited and played with some of the newer puzzles that I hadn’t packed away yet… predictably I got absolutely nowhere. Don’t get me wrong, there are only two pieces and only one way they can ultimately end up together as a cube – but how the heck they get there and where you need to start are indeed surprisingly tricky!

Some serious puzzling later I’d explored the potential starting positions (there aren’t a lot of “entries”) and begun to knock off the dead-ends – until I found the one true path and had a neatly assembled cube in my grubby mitts. The two pieces fit together perfectly and the tolerances along the way are pretty impressive – line the pieces up properly and you’ll be able to execute the required twists and turns – allow one of the pieces to be slightly off-kilter and the ability to twist or turn a piece vanishes.

I’m well-impressed at the quality of this puzzle – not just because it’s been produced by a friend who’s only admitted to making a handful of puzzles so far – it’s really first-class work – and the only imperfections on it are the two flattened corners where I dropped one of the pieces while I was taking the photos for this post (sorry Adin!). Thanks Adin.

 ________________________

On a slightly less puzzling note, Adin also dropped off a sheet of paper cunningly disguised as Yoda for me… he’d been experimenting with Origami well beyond my abilities when he asked if there was anything I wanted folded. Having tried and failed (spectacularly!) to fold a Yoda for myself a little while back, I suggested a Yoda might be nice – and when he asked which one I’d like I knew he was serious, so we agreed on a particularly handsome one … which he duly produced and presented to me along with Rotpack 1.

Thanks mate – it is SMASHING!

….and here’s a pic of my little Yoda next to the Origami burr he gave me a little while back…

Gregory Benedetti’s Blind Burr

That flannel bag? That's how Greg ships 'em! :-)

In the Design Competition room at IPP32 this one had me totally flummoxed!

I had a couple of attempts at it and literally I got nowhere ... it looks like a burr, and in the beginning it feels like a burr, the pieces moved in a burr-like manner, it’s called a Blind Burr, so it must be a burr, right? There are a few pieces that seem to slide around quite a lot, in fact there’s one in each axis that slides around rather a lot, which might make you think that this is a simple loosey-goosey arrangement that is going to come apart unexpectedly at some point ... and you’d be wrong, on pretty much every single one of those ... except the name. 

At the Saturday Puzzle Party Greg had a pile of these for sale and rather stupidly I didn’t buy one from him. He’d had a limited edition run made by Maurice Vigouroux in purpleheart and was selling them at a jolly reasonable price. After IPP Greg put the left-over puzzles up for sale on Puzzle Paradise and a couple of my mates over this side of the pond bought one and Chris sat me down at the our latest Midlands Puzzle Party and told me I needed to play with his copy as I would like it ... so I had to admit that I’d tried and failed in Washington, but he was pretty insistent ... so I played with it...

At first it was everything that I remembered: lots of movement, very little progress! Eventually I noticed something unexpected and explored that a little and found something very intriguing – I hadn’t ever expected burr pieces to behave like that! And yet, when they do, magic happens... and when I opened it, I was amazed at what I saw on the inside – this one is a triumph of simple design that works in a rather strange manner – it’s a delight to solve.

 

Having been shown what I was missing out on, I got home and ordered a copy from Puzzle Paradise ... along with a bloodwood copy of Greg’s Odd Repartition for good measure. They arrived about a week later and I’m delighted with it – I keep picking it up and opening it and then putting it all back together again because it’s so different, and interesting, and fun!

...and there’s a great little surprise when you solve it and count the pieces ... it’s not quite what you’re expecting! There’s an extra little piece in there ... and that little bit makes reassembly a whole heap easier, while making disassembly significantly tougher – genius!

This one will live in among the other ‘normal’ six-piece burrs on my shelf waiting for an unwitting puzzler to chance upon it...

Yet another excellent design from Greg that deserved to be a Top Ten vote-getter in the Design Competition. Bravo mon ami!

...and you can read Neil's thoughts on the Blind Burr over here...