A horse with a warrior

The fist time A horse with a warrior came up for sale I missed out in the lottery, so when the Karakuri-clan announced they’d be making another batch I tried again and managed to snaffle one the second time around.

 
This little guy is very much a statement piece - somewhat larger than your average Karakuri creation - it’s very obviously meant to be a Trojan beast of burden. 

While it’s clearly a horse, it’s definitely not so much of a horse that it’s lost its Trojan roots - those remain very clearly visible… and when you start playing with it there are several nods to that nature along the way. 

Kasho-San has introduced a number of wonderfully playful elements into the solve to remind you of the mythology, and possibly even nudge you along in the right direction. 

There are several pleasing steps along the solve, one or two surprises along the way and some really cool puzzle elements… and just in case you think you’re prematurely finished, there are one or two hints (including  a window into the beast’s soul and it’s very name!) to keep you going until you finally finish this solve… remember that if you haven’t found the hanko yet, you aren’t done…

King’s Day 2023

A few of us have been making the annual trip across the channel to Wil’s legendary King’s Day Puzzle Parties for a while now, and now that we seem to be past all the international lock-downs, Steve, Ali and I made the trip across once again this year.

We met up in Eindhoven where Louis picked the lads up from the airport and collected me from the train station (I’d flown into Schiphol). We checked into our hotel, grabbed a few puzzles and then headed to Louis’ where he’d laid out a fabulous spread for lunch. Well-feasted we hauled out the puzzles and settled into the usual routine of “Here you’ll like this one”, “That’s impossible” and “Aahhh, I really like that one!” with varying delays between them. (Louis’ delays tended to be a lot shorter than ours for some reason.)

I’d taken along my copies of Karakuri Packing, Chained Lumbers and Coin Wallet from Mine’s latest release knowing that the guys probably hadn’t played with them yet… they all went down really well, although Steve stopped short on one or two of them, choosing to delay any gratification in favour of respecting the designers… I’m sure that’s what he said.

Several of us had a play with Louis’ copy of Tri-Rodspan – a 12-piece co-ordinate motion puzzle designed by Bruce Patterson and modelled by George Bell. I’d printed out a set of pieces just before I left on this trip so I was keen to see how easily they went together – fortunately Steve was keen to see how easily Louis’ copy could be disassembled so I got the chance to assemble it. Unfortunately I didn’t pay quite enough attention to the colours and ended up reassembling them in a totally uncoordinated fashion… which set off some serious OCD twitching and a “proper assembly” was undertaken, only for Steve to spin it and start the whole process all over again…

I spent a while fiddling around with a copy of a tray-packing puzzle (Amsterdam?) calling for different levels of Dutch houses to be made in a frame… I managed a couple and felt quite good about myself until Louis promptly went and found several new solutions in a matter of minutes. (Apparently there are several challenges!)

Somewhere around 6pm Louis ordered a massive pile of pizzas which magically arrived at the door a short while later, so we feasted again… plenty pizzas disappeared include some of the famous cinnamon and sugar pizzas that were left for the dessert round.

At some point Mieke prompted us to see about playing an escape room and she and Louis then managed to find one that had a slot available for later that evening, so a short while after dinner we all piled into the car and headed off to a nearby town to help our mate Barry get his meth lab sorted before the cops raided it – and then we played an escape room.

The room had a few really good surprises – the first transition caught us all by surprise and made us all smile – there was some darkness-induced frustration in the second phase due to the flashlight we were supposed to have not being available as it was broken (as we discovered afterwards) and then the third phase was really well done… we made a bit of a meal of one of the main puzzles and that slowed us down a lot, but on the whole we cranked through it all pretty quickly and we enjoyed the room. It was fun to be on the other side of the law in a game…

Back to Louis’ for a little more puzzling before he deposited us back at our hotel for some sleep ahead of the main event on Sunday.

He duly collected us after breakfast and we headed off to Venlo where we were the first the arrive with Wil literally just having finished all his preparations. There were warm greetings and plenty catchings up over a quick coffee and tart before the rest of the known puzzling world began arriving.

The Monkeys had taken along a few copies of Burrly Legal to offload and custom-made Wil a six-piece Burrtle Opener to add to one of his collections – exceptionally well-played The Two Brass Monkeys!!!

The weather on Sunday was fantastic, so the outside tables were put to very good use, with Oskar in his usual spot with piles of new 3D-printed designs inviting anyone to have a fiddle. 

I spent quite a while getting myself hopelessly entangled in a copy of Rainbow Stairs – and just when I thought I was making some progress, Oskar sat down next to me and said “You realise that’s a variation of the Fifteen puzzle don’t you?” – a particularly cruelly-timed comment given I’d literally just got myself to the point where I needed to swap two pieces around… Thankfully(!) he went on to point out that it didn’t have the same parity constraints, so I might actually be able to solve it… and a while later I did indeed manage to align all of my rainbow’s stairs.

While I was doing that Steve was frantically twiddling the handle on Let That Sink In until it did in fact sink in (or out) and then Oskar talked us through the theory behind it – I loved the bit where he assumed we could all instantaneously multiply 7,11 and 13 in our heads while he was telling us about the design. (It’s 1,001, which is interesting because the opposing gears multiply out to 1,000…)

Several of us had a go at his Screw Gears – and I for one can confidently say that I did not come up with a helpful strategy for solving them – over dinner I did manage to almost assemble the screws in precisely the wrong order and I considered that a major achievement.

Michel was handing out copies of a safety pin challenge that I enjoyed playing with while I was writing this blog post – if you want to have a bash yourself, put three safety pins together in such a way that they won’t come apart, but if any one of the three pins is opened, all of the pins come apart.

It was great to catch up with Jan Willem again and to relieve him of a couple of old Karakuri boxes that he had spare copies of… and in time-honoured tradition when I went through airport security the next day, that was the one thing they were interested in! (I suspect they’re all closet Japanese puzzle box aficionados.)

I spent quite a while playing with some extremely rare wonderful old Karakuri boxes from Wil’s collection over the course of the afternoon – a rare treat indeed.

Frans was looking a lot less battered than he has been and it was nice to catch up with him and Rob and Goetz and Michel and Rob (yes, the other one) and Patrick and Christian… and no doubt several others that I chatted or puzzled with over the course of the day… and have forgotten to mention.

At some point the crowds began thinning out and when Wil received a call from his local restaurant he realised he totally missed his booking slot… we all bundled into a few cars and headed into town for another fabulous meal – with the obligatory puzzles on the table as usual. The food was superb, the company excellent and it turned into another night to remember.

Once dinner was complete a few of us ended up back at Wil’s for a little more puzzling and a lot more coffee – it’d been a long couple of days for some of us – before Louis saw us safely back to our hotel somewhere after midnight.

Thanks a stack to Wil for hosting us all on Sunday and giving us another King’s Day to remember and to Louis for fetching and carrying us over the weekend and entertaining and feeding us royally on the Saturday!

 <Some pics courtesy of Wil as I didn't take enough myself!>

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.

Whimsical fun!

That’s the only way to describe the first one: Sword from Hiroshi Iwahara!

It’s clear the Karakuri craftsmen were allowed to give absolute free rein to their designing muses when coming up with their entries for an exhibition entitled “Karakuri Experiments” – Iwahara-san has imagined something that wouldn’t go amiss in a Zelda adventure – right down to the subtly pixelated look of the sword.

The (wooden) sword arrives safely secured inside it’s decorated wooden scabbard – it wiggles around a fair bit and teases you quite a lot. Your goal is to safely remove the sword and not give yourself a nasty nick in the process… OK the latter might be simpler than the former.

It’s not super-hard as a puzzle, but it is a delightfully whimsical creation that will put a smile on every single solver’s face, guaranteed… and it really stands out in the puzzle cabinet!

Flaskolation was Yasuaki Kikuchi’s contribution to the exhibition – his reaction to the pandemic that’s gripped the world for the past year and a half… and a contribution to puzzlers around the world to help raise a smile in these difficult times.

He gives us a box with an outline of a flask on the top and an apparent drawer on one side. The flask has a bunch of strange markings on it that don’t make an awful lot of sense at first… and then there’s the wooden syringe – well, why not?!

Some closer inspection shows a shiny little ball trapped inside the outline of the flask – that must be interesting, surely? Some medical experimentation will probably help and soon enough you’ll have the little drawer hanging open… once you’ve worked out what all those little markings really mean of course – you definitely aren’t going to fluke this one!

Last up in this post, from the same exhibition, is Conditioned Reflex – a little Pavlovian plaything from Yoh Kakuda.

I’m a dog person, so getting a puzzle that looks like a cute little puppy was always a no-brainer for me…  and then discovering along the way that it even behaves like a dog was the cherry on the top for me. Sitting still it looks cute, but during the solve it gets even cuter.

…definitely a whimsical bunch of boxes from the superb craftsmen at the Karakuri Creation Group.

Penguin Box

Cuteness personified!

There you go, two-word blog post. Says it all!

Each year the folks at the Karakuri Creation Group run an ideas contest, with the best ideas selected to be turned into actual puzzle boxes by their master craftsmen. This year the standout cutest idea came from Yoichi Chiku who proposed the idea of a tobogganing penguin box. Beautifully crafted by Yoh Kakuda, the Penguin Box provides you with a flat sheet of (maple) ice and your very own little penguin to play with.

The little guy is a handsome be-tuxed fellow made of walnut, magnolia and maple, and he certainly looks the part. The blurb on the Karakuri website reliably informs you that penguins can move faster on land by sliding on their bellies than they can by walking – they don’t exactly have long legs, do they? That process – fun fact – is known as “tobogganing”. Anyone else feeling their heart song coming to the fore yet? The website ends off by encouraging you to “Please slide well!” – which is sound advice.

OK, so the puzzle element isn’t massive on this one, in fact the blurb on the web site more or less tell you what to do… there is a bit of a knack to getting it to behave properly though, but once you master that there’s a lovely movement that sees the tobogganing be-tuxed penguin magically releasing the secret drawer.

Guaranteed to put a smile on the face of the puzzler, no matter what their age!

Cuteness personified!

 

Skyscrapers

Osamu Kasho created this rather interesting little puzzle box for the latest Karakuri Creation Group exhibition entitled “GO” – which if you’ve been paying attention to my blog posts, dear reader, you know that the symbol for “GO” can also be interpreted as “five” – and there are five neat little buildings on the top of this box. There’s a rather obvious drawer on the front and a potentially slidey-looking-thingy on the side of the box… and an unusual pattern on the top the box. 

It looks interesting and draws you in…

Examine the buildings a little closer and you’ll see they can change height – by the way, I love the little details on the buildings in the windows and doors and even a helipad. 

So having discovered that they change height, it becomes clear that you’re going to be setting the heights properly in order to release the drawer – so far so good – and if you’re a bit of an agricultural puzzler like I am, you might be tempted to try and pick this particular lock – and you’ll discover that the designer is a better man than you are… you cannot actually feel this one out – you have to solve it properly!

So much for the brute force approach!

Turns out using some finesse is definitely rewarded, but the tolerances on this one are wonderfully precise – you really do need to gets things absolutely spot-on before she will reveal her secrets.

I love the fact that this one teases a little and then forces you to do things properly. Much respect to the craftsman on this one…

5 times 5 times 5

Another gem from my latest Karakuri haul – this time from Hiroshi Iwahara – master of higher move interacting and n-ary move puzzle boxes. 

This one was also made for the “GO” exhibition and uses the double-meaning to focus on the number five – in this case 5*5*5 – which, coincidentally gives the number of moves to open the box.

Crafted in stunning silky oak, this puzzle provides therapy and meditation as you run through the 125-move sequence to open and close it. At point there is always only a single route and you’re either going forwards or backwards – Belgian Maze anyone? As long as you remember which way you came from  - there’s never a chance of doubling back on yourself… which sounds perfectly sensisble but I’m afraid I often find my addled brain forgetting that very thing, especially when I’m really in-the-zone and motoring through the solution path, although in fairness it might also have something to do with my fingers getting slightly ahead of my brain and moving things without the brain necessarily registering the fact. 

Either way, it’s a lovely puzzle to fiddle with and wander up and down the path to openness. (See what I did there?!) 

As is customary, the puzzle comes with a handy solution sheet – and this one’s got some interesting little extra drawings and information on it, not just the sequence of moves required to open the box.

There are some neat little drawings that help you to visualise the internals – picture an inverted Rune Cube with all the mazes hidden inside – and some analysis of the number of times that each pin traverses parts of the mazes… nice touch! 

Great for intermediate levels of therapy – you know, when you aren’t quite up to tackling the 324-move chaps!