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…

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!

Vectes / Ghidorah Box

The last of my writes-up on Eric Fuller’s latest offering is an unusual pair of caged burrs. They were designed by different people at about the same time and they share a common cage – so Eric has produced them as a set with a single cage and two pairs of burr pieces.

The common bit, the cage, is made of walnut and uses some nifty shouldered joints to make sure that enthusiastic puzzlers aren’t left holding a pile of pieces when trying to extract those three little burr pieces.

It’s a simple 6*6*6 cage with an outer ring on each side and a 2*2 hole in the centre. Then there are four interfering cubes in the middle layer of each face that are either offset clockwise or anti-clockwise around the face in such a way that opposite sides coincide ... a few designers (not just these two!) have employed frames this shape in their devious pursuits.

Ghidorah Box was designed by Yavuz Demirhan in 2012 and has three dissimilar pieces that Eric has made in canarywood. Eric billed the Ghidorah Box as the warm-up of the two puzzles inasmuch as it has “only” a level 22 solution – although I reckon it’s still a pretty decent challenge. There are only so many ways that you can put the three pieces together in an interlocking form, and then it’s just a case of working out how to get them in that target shape inside the frame from hell! I tend to think of working in terms of degrees of freedom – get as much freedom as you can with the pieces in situ so that you can introduce the last piece and then work them together into the target shape ... sometimes it works!

Vectes designed by Alfons Eyckmans uses burr pieces that are two units longer than the frame, so they end up sticking out either end, and generally getting even more in the way during solving. These pieces have been cut from some lovely yellowheart and also fit perfectly in the frame. A couple of the moves in this solution involve some pretty precise positioning of the pieces and it’s pretty clear that Eric has got the fit spot on – get them properly aligned and they move perfectly, have one of the burrs a little off line and it will refuse to slide home... the bevelling on the ends does help with that a little.

Vectes is the definitely daddy here at level 37 moves to free the first piece and that translates into more manoeuvring to get some of the bits in a useful space to move the other bits around... lovely puzzles that work really neatly as a pair.

WELL DONE Eric for spotting the common thread and for producing a pair that go together beautifully.

Afterthought: as I was writing up this post my mind went wandering a little and I wondered if it would be possible to mix and match the pieces a bit ... and indeed it is! Franken-puzzle anyone?

Slow Waltz

I was really looking forward to getting my grubby paws on Eric Fuller’s version of Jeff Namkung’s Slow Waltz. I’d played around with a couple of Jeff’s designs courtesy of Richard Gain’s Shapeways versions and found the designs were excellent, so the prospect of getting my hands on a beautifully crafted wooden version was more than a bit tempting. 

My copy is made of sapele and macassar ebony and lives up to Eric’s normal exacting standards. The two woods give a bit of a clue to the shapes of the pieces – but don’t really make it too easy, after all this is a level 14.8 puzzle, so there’s quite a lot of business to be done before you can release any pieces at all – and it stays interesting pretty much all the way through to the end, with the last two pieces not exactly falling apart either. 

The puzzle starts with an almost complete 4*4*4 cube – there’s a cubie missing from one of the faces. From there you start by opening things up a bit and making some room so that you can get some of the more useful bits moving around – there are a couple of really unusual moves that might evade you for a while, depending on how you grip this puzzle. I discovered a couple of blind alleys during the disassembly (and several more on the assembly!). It’s a fun puzzle to sit and resolve as the movements do seem quite choreographed with things first going one way, and then the other. 

It may only have five pieces, but this is a really good design ... for ages I found myself stumped on working out how to introduce one particular piece because the “obvious” way to do it turns out to be less than useless. This is probably the cube that I’ve had to take apart and reassemble the most in order to get to know it – it’s a great little challenge.

...now if only I can get myself to stop counting 1-2-3 ...   

   1-2-3 ...                           

as I'm taking it apart...

[Kevin's written about his thoughts on the Slow Waltz in this post.]