More Karakuri Experiments

A couple more boxes from the designs for the Karakuri Experiments exhibition, this time from Kamei and Kawashima-san. These two are probably a bit more mainstream and traditional than the ones in the previous Karakuri post, but most definitely worth playing with.

Twin 5 is Kawashima-san’s fifth Twin box and takes inspiration from Kamei’s 1983 Top Box. The family resemblance to the other Twins is clear to see and the reference to one of Kamei’s classics might help the intrepid solver… I guess.

Start fiddling around with this one and it shouldn’t take you long to find one or two interesting things to do… but then, if you’re anything like me, you hit an absolute brick wall and can’t find any way to proceed.

I spent quite a while here, going back over the few moves I’d discovered and trying to find anything at all interesting to do along the way… and failing miserably.

I began exploring some seriously whacky theories, all to no avail. I tried some of the older tricks from this terrific craftsman’s previous puzzles – nada!

This one literally had me thinking for days until a chance discovery opened up the final move and had me gently cursing and smiling broadly at the same time…

Kawashima-san says this box “requires very few steps, so even beginners can enjoy it” – and he ain’t kidding… and part of me wonders if beginners might even solve this one quicker that well-seasoned puzzlers.

Kamei’s contribution to the exhibition was Maze Box – almost certainly a clue to the mechanism, right? (Sort of - it turns out it's a refence to another of his 1983 creations...)

The top of the box has a distinctive inlaid daisy, or Margaret / Marguerite flower that really sets this box apart – someone’s gone to a lot of trouble on this one.

Strangely the box come with three little dowels, which seem to match up with the six holes in the bottom of the box… although exactly how useful either of those two discoveries is, remains to be seen.

Once again, I spent a while exploring several fruitless avenues before thinking something along the lines of “It couldn’t really be that elegant, could it?”

This one will definitely leave you scratching your head over the mechanism that locks this puzzle up. I’m sure that there’s a relatively straight-forward approach that I just haven’t thought of yet, but I’m probably going to carry on believing that there are little fairies inside the box that release the locks when they sense that you’ve done all of the things you’re supposed to do – it really seems magical.

Some Japanese Nonsense!

In spite of the title, this is a lovely pair of historic treasures…

Created in 1984(!) as a collaboration between Nob Yoshigahara and Akio Kamei, and brilliantly executed by the latter, this pair of boxes really belongs together. Not just because they look similar in their cherry and walnut woods, but because their mechanisms are really similar, yet totally opposite…

Nonsense Box – the cherry wood one – is named after the fact that it is thoroughly useless as a box… from the devious mind of Nob Yoshigahara it displays his sense of humour rather neatly… why would anyone ever decide to design a box that was thoroughly useless?!

W-Nonsense was Kamei’s reprise on the topic – theoretically less useless than Nob’s Nonsense, but ultimately just as useless… 

…and sadly, as I like to try and avoid spoiling puzzles, even ones you’re not likely to come across every day, that's about all I can say on that aspect of the them…

I can however tell you that they rattle, a lot – there are a lot of pins inside there, and they’re big – a lot bigger than I thought they were from their pictures!

Despite their age (over 30 years now!) they still operate perfectly – serious props to Kamei-san!

… funny thing is, that I find a lot of puzzlers don’t stop to enjoy the joke – open the first box, close it up. Open the second box and close it up. Then move on to something else… without stopping to think about the obvious pairing, their differences and where the name comes from… pity that.

Lovely little bit of puzzling history in there... two of the greats, having a laugh together...

Kamei Small Box 1

I chanced upon a copy of this lovely little 1999 Kamei creation recently while I was at a little puzzle gathering near London… a friend had it for sale and after trying unsuccessfully for a while to open it, I asked for the price and a deal was struck…

I spent a bit more time trying to open it and made very little headway – I thought I’d found something interesting and then couldn’t make up my mind if the rattling inside was part of the mechanism or just a noise-maker inserted to 

confuse puzzlers.

Make no mistake – I was confused by it! I was pretty sure I’d deduced the subtelties of what I was trying to do, but for the life of me, I couldn’t actually get it to do anything…

Oli duly had a bash and a few minutes later there was a broadening grin on his face and he quickly hid what he’d been doing from me… convinced himself he’d fully solved it and then gave it back all locked up again – Thanks mate!

I explored some more and tried a little more insistently on what I had been trying to do – to be rewarded with a little movement – some encouragement from Oli and soon enough I was in…

This box is really unusual in its mechanism – and it’s small – less than 5cm on a side – the locking mechanism is SO beautifully disguised that you could very easily overlook it for absolutely ages… yet a mere three moves opens the box and there’s a lot of space inside it…

Classic Kamei – beautifully made in rosewood – it’s definitely stood the test of time!

Karakuri Christmas 2015

…a little(!) late, but here’s my customary post on my Karakuri Christmas gifts from last year…

Their timing was pretty spot-on this year, with my package of Christmas goodies from Japan just clearing customs in time for Christmas… which meant there was Japanese puzzle box goodness under the Christmas tree alongside the Stickman-goodness that I’ve already told you about.

 

This year I ordered gifts from six artists… making me formally a creature of habit! 

Let’s start with easily the cutest among my selection, Osamu Kasho’s Panda – instantly recognisable as the sad-faced panda, this one is going to be a firm favourite in the cute-stakes. While not hugely challenging, I have seen grown puzzlers spend more than a couple of minutes finding the first move on this little cutie… which makes it officially a puzzle and not just a curiosity in my books! And you gotta love that face…

Next up is Tatsuo Miyamoto’s Book – again not a super-complex puzzle, although it requires twice as many steps as the Panda, but this one’s execution is really terrific. The choice of woods and the use of grain is really excellent – so not only does the cover and spine look like it should, but the grain on the sides gives the impression of a book’s pages as well – and the puzzle mechanism incorporates elements that you’d expect from a book-shaped puzzle… I rather like it!

Kamei produced a variation on his well-known theme with his Box with a Ribbon III – it really looks the part and there’s a lovely little bit of subterfuge with a nod back to previous incarnations as well… I enjoyed the solving experience but have had one or two folks mention that their copies tended to solve themselves, which might provide a bit of a disappointment… mine has just the right amount of tolerance to let you find things reasonably easily without any chance of it spontaneously opening. 

Mr Monkey from Shiro Tajima is a super cool-looking puzzle – when it starts it looks like a monkey’s head on a little stand… manipulating that stand turns it into a pair of shades for the now super-chilled simian. 

 

It’s hard not to smile at him… once again the ape’s best features have been turned into the means of opening this little puzzle box and it is a rather interesting sequence of moves – quite unlike anything else I’ve come across before…

Hideaki Kawashima’s Twin 3 is another extension on a design theme – this time taking things to a whole other plane… finding the first move on this puzzle is interesting… after the first move they sort of get a little more predictable, for a while, then they veer off in altogether another direction entirely… and rest assured, when you think you’ve found it all, you probably haven’t… this one has a lot of secrets to give up.

Finally in my bunch was Bean Bag Drawer 2 from Hiroshi Iwahara – building on last year’s Bean Bag Drawer. This one looks a bit like a playground bruiser – and fiddling around with the obvious interesting bits yields a pretty simple means of getting the drawer half open… but getting it fully open and gaining access to the second secret compartment is you real mission… you’ll need to pay quite a lot of attention to those locking mechanisms and establish just how and why they sometimes behave a little differently and then learn how to exploit that for good… a very satisfying puzzle to (eventually!) solve... easily the hardest solve in the bunch!

As usual I was pretty chuffed with this (OK, last) year’s selection – a couple of really interesting tough puzzles and some really nice puzzles that I might not have given a second look had I been forced to choose them from a line-up in a web-shop – but all thoroughly nice puzzles that I won’t be letting go of any time soon…

The Karakuri Club membership is still a cracking deal for picking up some interesting Japanese puzzle boxes… as long as you don’t mind being surprised by what you get as you only get to select the craftsmen and have no idea what they’re going to produce until your presents arrive, hopefully just before Christmas… go on, spoil yourself! :-)