Shutout

A mate of mine managed to procure a copy of Shutout from Osanori Yamamoto for me recently and I think it’s excellent and deserves to be shouted about.

The design is that pure and simple that it seems like someone should have tried it ages ago… but when you try and solve it, you’ll probably understand why that hasn’t happened until Osanori did it: you might well think it’s not possible!

As with all of these puzzles from Osanori-san, the goal is to make an apparent cube inside a frame. The frame in this case is most of a cube with a couple of slits on opposite sides that are perpendicular to one another. One goes deeper than the other, but apart from that they’re unremarkable…

The pieces on the other hand are intriguing – you are given 6 T-tetrominoes – no weirdly shaped pieces that need to dance around one another, just six T’s…

…and if at this stage you’re thinking to yourself that this is going to be simple, you’d be best to remember who the designer is, and take things slowly…

No matter how slowly you take things it won’t take you long to tie yourself in tiny little knots – start dropping pieces in and you realise they start blocking the very slot you need to drop the last few pieces into… getting most of the pieces in is simple – getting them all in turns out to be impossible.

Step 1. Tick.

Having realised this isn’t going to be a simple case of dropping pieces into the frame, you reassess your options and engage Think (c)…

..and experiment a bit and learn how some of the pieces interact and move, and then experiment a whole lot more… along the way convincing yourself that no amount of manipulation is actually going to help – Yup! Step 1 (again). Tick.

…and then when the epiphany finally comes you realise that you can in fact get to that strange intermediate state you’ve been chasing for a while and then it is finally possible to insert the last piece – cue fat smile – and huge appreciation for a disarmingly cunning design from a true master.

Puzzling in Wales-shire

This week’s blog post was delayed a little by a family trip to Wales-shire… Oz was over visiting from Cape Town so Gill found us a stunning self-catering barn 5 minutes’ walk from the beach… sounds awful doesn’t it? Hopefully the picture will confirm just how much I was taking-for-the-team… I did get to take some puzzles along, and there was a goodly amount of time spent puzzling… some of which will deserve their own write-up so they’ll hardly get a mention here.

…along those lines, the day before we left, my latest package arrived from Wil, complete with a copy of the Butterfly Lock Box (aka Pleasure and Pain) and Ying Yang 69 puzzles – those will definitely need to feature on their own at some point… for now I will only say that they’re both great puzzles – and my inherent distrust of the puzzle-meister saved me a fair amount of pain! ;-)

Aside from the latest arrivals, I wanted to take puzzles that would keep me puzzling for a good while, so there were a few multi-challenge puzzles from Thinkfun for me to work through, some Minoru Abe sliding tile puzzles and several entanglements from Dick Hess – most of which had proved my undoing in the past… I was going to refer to them as my nemesii, but realised there’s probably a good reason that there’s no plural for nemesis. A couple of Osanori Yamamoto puzzles rounded out the puzzles that were successfully solved while I was away…

…and the quick-witted among you will realise there is at least one obvious omission – that’s ‘cos it wasn’t solved while I was away… hopefully you’ll also notice that I took my special £2 coin along for the obligatory photograph! 

The lengths I go to…

Two Thinkfun multi-challenge puzzles helped keep me puzzling for several hours on the Gower:

Turnstile provides 40 graded challenges (the earlier ones just really get you used to the mechanics of the game) where you’re given a start positions with gates and pieces set up in a particular fashion. Your challenge is to move the coloured counters to their home corners while negotiating the turnstiles and the other pieces (the grey pieces are basically just movable road blocks).  Good fun to take out and work through a few challenges at a time before switching across to another puzzle… the latter challenges will definitely give you something to think about, but remain accessible. 

Tilt provides a great real-world implementation of gravity mazes that seem to pop up in puzzle apps quite regularly. The challenge cards show you where to place blocking pieces and green and blue counters. Your job is to tilt the board successively in different directions so that the green counters fall through the hole in the centre and the blues all remain on the board… and the only rule you need to worry about is that you must let all pieces slide and come to a rest against something (i.e. no sneaky half-moves – that’s cheating!). Having played one or two of these apps definitely helps a bit, but the later challenges have a number of traps for the unwary (yes, I was very unwary!) – but resetting and starting over only takes a few seconds and you’re ready to go with a clean board. Nice real world application of this sort of puzzle – with the mechanics working pretty much all the time, but if anything does get caught, a tap or two will send them on their way. 

A couple of weeks ago I’d picked up three Osanori Yamamoto burrs from Satomi at CU-Japan. These weren’t particularly expensive as they’re made from thin laser-cut MDF. While nothing beats a lovely exotic wooden version, until someone takes up the challenge of making them, these represent a great cost-effective way of getting the designs out into the market. 

Rose presents you with four interlocking pieces trapped in a central circular frame. Your first job is the find what movements are possible, and with a new puzzle, the pieces need to be well-aligned or you won’t find anything moving. Find some movement and if you’re like me, you’ll find yourself going round and round in circles… you need to be a little more subtle than I generally am to find the next set of moves – and given the designer, you’ll be tempted to start exploring all manner of rotational moves as well… good luck with that! 

Rose 2 is a development of Rose, with a more complicated frame and some differences in the pieces… you probably want to play with Rose before going on to Rose 2 if you want to maximise your enjoyment on these two… another lovely little design that will amuse the most-hardened puzzlist. (Oh and it take 26 moves to release the first piece!)  

# Shield gives you a frame with four pieces that need to make up a “#” sign inside the frame, only this time there’s a ledge along the bottom that will block quite a few rather useful moves… which makes it a rather nice challenge. 

A pair of sliding tile puzzles from Minoru Abe kept me quiet for quite a while. Angel and Satan has two simple little creatures, each made up of three pieces that need to be transposed – that’s all! There’s a huge gap in the centre between the two figures and only a tiny little interfering piece in the centre. Yet it’s thoroughly non-trivial! I’d had several bashes at it before my holiday and got nowhere, so I was delighted when I finally managed to work out how to make use of every little feature in the design to get those two creatures to swap places… I think the optimal solution requires 74 moves… I took somewhat more!

Runaway II provides a 5 different challenges with varying themes on moving a set of digits from 1 to 4 from the top to the bottom (or vice versa) via two different sized cut-outs between the two rows… Oh, and there are a pair of stars and a heart to get in the way and force you to think a few moves ahead… which I’m rubbish at! 

Finally, in preparation for an upcoming visit form the entangle-meister himself, I took a few sets of Dick Hess’ entanglements along … mainly because I’m thoroughly rubbish at them and haven’t been able to solve any of them yet and I wanted to avoid the embarrassment of having to admit I couldn’t solve any of his puzzles at all…

First off the Mini-Menagerie Puzzles – Dick’s IPP26 exchange puzzle. This set consists of the Ox, Rhino and Whale and to the neophyte, they all look like they’re more or less the same puzzle… yet I hadn’t managed to solve them yet despite the odd attempt at doing exactly that! 

To the untrained eye, the Whale looks to be the simplest… so I started there, and promptly got nowhere – it doesn’t have a lot of the complications that the other animals have, yet I just couldn’t get it to do what I wanted… so I switched to one of the land-based animals and had a little more luck, after quite a while I found I could get the Ox’s bits to do something interesting that I hadn’t expected, and pretty soon I had removed its tail (or rider, of you prefer). 

Flushed with a sense of victory I switched attention to the Rhino and tried something similar – only to find that simply wouldn’t work… so I spent a long time experimenting before I finally found something (else) totally unexpected …and had its tail off too. The Whale finally succumbed too, but only after I’d generated a HUGE amount of respect for my friend Dick – he’s made those puzzles all look thoroughly similar, but are they? Heck! That was a lot of fun, and I’m now looking forward to trying my inexperienced hand at some more of his puzzles – if they give me half as much of an A-Ha! moment I’m going to be very chuffed!

The final two puzzles in the pics are a pair of Dick’s Sisters – from his IPP29 exchange puzzle Three Sisters – spot the missing one yet? Sadly I only managed to take two of the sisters apart – the Tall Sister still eludes me… 

These puzzles again look totally similar yet the subtle differences in the shapes or the design of the rings makes their solutions totally different – Blonde and Dancing Sister yielded after a good session of experimenting where the solution always looks like it’s not too far off – you’re pretty sure you know where you’re trying to get things, they just won’t quite go where you want them… a couple of little bits of wire kept me wonderfully amused for hours… thanks Dick!

Petit Puzzle

I’d been putting together an order from Jakub at the New Pelikan Workshop and just before I was about to finalise it, I spotted a new pic from Jakub on Facebook featuring an interesting caged burr called Petit Puzzle designed by Osanori Yamamoto. I asked Jakub to please add it on to my order and let me know what the new total was, but he refused to take any money for it and told me it was a gift from him. 

The parcel duly arrived a few days later and this little puzzle is really excellent – with just three pieces, two burr-bits in a cage, it looks seductively simple – I mean, there are only three bits to it – how hard can it be?

Well, it has a level 11.2 solution… and its designer is well-known for designing “interesting” puzzles. This one’s no exception!

From the starting position there are only so many things you can do … and some of them lead to dead ends. Find the right path and you’ll find yourself being presented with a few more forks in the road, some interesting movements and then a view of how things should probably proceed in order to make enough room to get one of the pieces out of the way … and then there’s the little Yamamoto twist in the tail right at the end as well.

Reassembly isn’t trivial but shouldn’t take too long – and don’t be put off by the relatively high level – there are a couple of distinct stages to solving this one and each one takes a few moves to accomplish … eminently solvable – even by non-burristas like me!

I feel compelled at the end of this little write-up to make specific mention of the quality of this puzzle – Jakub and the New Pelikan Workshop guys have always produced good quality puzzles and charged incredibly reasonable prices for them, but they seem to have stepped things up a gear recently – the quality of this puzzle is easily on a par with that produced by one of my favourite American burr-makers. In fact at the last MPP I challenged a couple of my mates to guess who’d made this puzzle and some of them actually thought it was that American chap – Congratulations Jakub! The quality of your work is astounding for the prices you charge.

Pair Dance

[Forgive me blogfather for I have not blogged for 10 days ...  

I'll be in the corner doing my Hail Coffins.]

Eric’s latest releases at Cubic Dissection included a real little gem from Osanori Yamamoto called Pair Dance. They were available in a choice of woods and mine has a jatoba frame and a pair of purpleheart burr pieces. 

It arrives assembled and the first thing you’ll notice is that the tolerances are incredible! When I started playing with it those pieces were very snug and needed to be kept cleanly aligned to enable them to move. While I was idly fiddling around I noticed that in a few of the configurations, you could rotate one or both of the pieces inside the frame, and thinking I was onto something useful, I spent a while exploring what turned out to be an unnecessary diversion. 

There is a relatively clear series of moves required to get to a place where you can start making good progress toward getting the pieces out of the frame. From there it’s a reasonably straight-forward process of doing what you can, making some adjustments and then doing what you can again until the first piece is freed. 

 

Putting them back in is a bit more of a challenge, although having a symmetrical frame does help reduce the combinations. Even though it’s a level 14 puzzle, it’s reasonably accessible, even for non-burrphiles like myself!

It’s a fun puzzle to fiddle with and I often find myself grabbing it from beside the PC and playing around absent-mindedly with it while I’m engrossed in something useful, or watching videos of cute puppies on YouTube. 

[Oh, and rotations aren't required!] 

The last Dvořák goodies for now...

...and so onto the third instalment covering my little order of puzzling-goodness from Jakub.  This post includes three designs from Japanese wiz Osanori Yamamoto - each of which is rather 'different'.

Cockpit  is a cubic cage with three C-shaped pieces that interfere through the centre ... one of them has an extra cubie that really manages to get in the way disproportionately for such a small piece. Four of the cube's faces have crosses cut out of them and the remaining two have a full 3*3 square opening. 

As you can imagine, solving Cockpit is going to rely on manoeuvring the pieces apart in order to free up enough space to allow the pieces to pass one another (similar to Estergon and co.) The trick here is that the crosses on most of the sides mean that you're constantly having to move pieces around in particular order to enable the next move as you go first one way, then the next ... which gets you up to 16 moves to remove the first piece - and once again, an awful lot of scope for blind allies to lose yourself in!

Ice Pillar is a great name for the next puzzle as the finished puzzle looks like a classical pillar with four burr pieces passing through a hollow column. Right from the get-go there's a lot of movement - in fact every single piece will move in at least one direction - and some of them will move in several - so you're totally spoilt for choice trying to find the 30 moves required to release the first piece. 

 

In taking it apart I invoked Walker's Patented Solution of randomly fumbling around trying to make as much space in one area as I could, and whenever I ran out of opportunities, switch attention to a nearby area and try and move the space over there, until you eventually stumble across the right spot with more or less the right amount of space and you can see a route toward removing the first piece ... then it's not too hard... although along the way you can get the pieces dangling out in the breeze where you'd think they would just about fall out of their own accord, except they're still steadfastly stuck!

Putting it back together again is another story entirely! There is a single solution possible from a potential 1500-odd assemblies ... there is no way my brain will stretch to that, so I invoked Master Rover's gift to puzzledom to find my way back... and to some extent sort of surprised myself that I'd managed to take it apart unaided... this one's a toughie!

The last puzzle in the group isn't the hardest, and possibly not even the best looking, but it's my favourite.  Two Pairs One is a confusing looking little puzzle - at first it appears to be a cubic frame with two burr running through it, until you start moving the bits around and realise that the frame splits along the diagonal in a step-wise manner... and then the fun begins!

 

Successively moving the burrs in and out and the frame apart along the diagonal opens up the frame - until you find you can't go any further ... this puzzle has a habit of mocking you along the way - it certainly mocked my (in)abilities along the way - it might only be a level 9 puzzle, but there are a lot of entertaining little byways along the way to lose yourself in ... and you'll hear it gently laughing at you when you do that... I found that mine laughs quite a lot!