A Pair of Jolly puzzles

In his latest round, Eric Fuller also offered a couple of new Tom Jolly designs for sale – and both looked rather neat, so I added them both to the basket along with the Havana’s #1 box.

Rattle Box is a deceptively simple-looking take-apart puzzle. At the start it looks like a 5-unit cube although one of the central cubies seems to be missing a corner … that little piece turns out to be almost a 2-unit cube (it’s missing a cubie) that falls inside the 5-unit frame and rattles around a bit.

Once it’s inside, it becomes apparent that the frame is made up of a few oddly-shaped pieces that interlock, and if that little cube weren’t rattling around inside there, it would probably come apart quite neatly – albeit in a serially interlocking fashion.

The frame bits are nicely designed so that they don’t give you an unobstructed view of the insides – which means that you need to experiment with the little cube in various orientations (remember there’s a missing cubie!) and in various places in order to work out what the internal structure looks like. That will enable you to determine which bits are likely to come apart first and then you can concentrate your efforts on removing that bit…

Now either this is a REALLY well designed puzzle, or I was being a bit thick [be nice – put your money on the former!] but I found that I was concentrating on one bit and it was another one altogether that eventually came out first – in fact, I hadn’t even realised that it could move until it was just about ready to come out!

Once the first piece is out, releasing the rest is still a non-trivial exercise – and then reassembling it is actually easier than taking it apart – which in my books makes it an interesting little puzzle.

As always, Eric’s done a lovely job of making these – the tolerances are just right to keep its secrets until you’ve really found the right movements combined with the correct place and orientation of the baby cube.

Ribbon Puzzle is the second Tom Jolly design in this little bundle. It’s a delightful little 6-piece burr. 

Eric ships them unassembled – gee, thanks mate! – so it took a little while before I could really enjoy it properly. Eric notes it has a level 7.4.4.4 solution so this one is definitely at the outer bound of my burr-abilities! Disassembly is somewhere between “non-trivial” and “quite interesting” on Walker’s scale of difficulty-ness – there seem to be a couple of dead ends to wander into and while there’s a reasonable amount of movement available during the process, a lot of it isn’t useful, and it’s generally a good idea to keep everything square and properly positioned or you’ll risk introducing even more complications.

Eric has a knack of producing puzzles like this to a delightful scale – small enough to be played with at the fingertips without actually being too fiddly to deal with – and they look absolutely gorgeous (and the price is pretty attractive too!).

Wunder Puzzle:

I was a little late getting to Eric Fuller’s latest round of new sales on CubicDissection – I missed the email alert by going to bed 10 minutes too early, and by the time I logged on first thing the next morning, all the new burrs had been snapped up by earlier birds or folks in a more suitable time zone. Casting an eye around the items still available, I spotted the Wunder Puzzle – available in three flavours all made by Eric’s fair hand. 

Reading Eric’s blurb, he’d copied the original design from an old puzzle that a mate had bought off EBay, but while he’d been working on the copy, he thought of a couple of improvements, and turned those into two additional variations. The joints looked rather interesting so I decided to take a punt on Mechanism#2 because it sounded like the most complicated ... and then promptly ordered a 3E, a Lattice and Remove the Yolk – just to make shipping it to the UK worthwhile, you understand – not because I’m addicted to buying puzzles! [Really, Gill, I promise!]

Wunder PuzzleMechanism #2 (the Paduak one on the right) duly arrived and I really liked it. It’s a modest looking little puzzle about 9cm tall – the contrasting woods make it clear that there’s a special sort of joint between the two main pieces. [For ‘special’ here, read ‘impossible-looking’!] Prodding and poking and tugging various bits gives you some ideas worth trying, while thinking a bit about the weight and the materials will suggest there’s likely to something a bit denser on the inside – and indeed a little wave of the old handy compass (why do puzzlers always have a compass handy at their desks!?) suggest this little item may well be interfering with the earth’s magnetic north pole. 

 

About half an hour of fiddling and experimenting, applying a bit of Rule 11, and yet more fiddling, I found the two halves sliding apart in a most unusual way – or at least, not in the way that I was expecting! The insides are beautifully made and the fit is really great – resulting in that impossible-joint-y-look from the outside.  I really enjoyed that ... so much so, that I decided pretty much right away that I needed to get hold of the other two in the series – so hopped in the inter-web and ordered them ...

A bit more than a week later another small box arrived from Cubic-land with the Original and Mechanism#1. Having already hurled myself in the deep end with #2, I reverted back to the Original (the Bubinga one on the left) and laid into that one first ... and to be honest, it didn’t take very long to open – but still a satisfying little puzzle to open. 

From there I moved on to Mechanism#1 (the Walnut one in the centre) – which given the unconventional order of my attack turned out to be the most interesting of the lot – it seemed a lot lighter than the other puzzles, and no amount of Rule 11-ing would yield any internal noises, which got me thinking that this one must be different ... and indeed it is totally different! Eric has created a totally new puzzle here that just happens to look like the other two quite similar puzzles in the series ... when I first spotted something odd happening, I was confused – then it hit me what he was doing and it’s brilliant! Releasing the puzzle is a wee bit fiddly but quite straight-forward once you’ve worked out what to do – guaranteed to put a smile on your face after the Original or Mechanism#2.  

• The Original is a good little puzzle – if you’ve done a few, you’re likely to guess at the mechanism, but that joint is a great feature.
• Mechanism#1 is a breath of fresh air – totally different!
• Mechanism#2 builds on the Original and adds a mean twist. 

I reckon they make a great little set – and if like me, you only bought Mechanism#2, you’re missing out! 

[At time of writing there were still a few Original and Mechanism#1 available here. UPDATE: Sorry folks - they're all gone now...]

Variations on a theme...

I came across the purple puzzle on a visit to Hamley’s in London years ago ... it had the usual colourful Thinkfun packaging, but what caught my eye was the tagline on the box: “The world’s most difficult 4-piece jigsaw” – and yeah, verily, it looked just like a simple 4-piece jigsaw puzzle inside the box ... but how can you resist a challenge like that? It was only a few quid, so I picked one up...

Open the packaging and things got ‘interesting’ – there are indeed 4 simple looking jigsaw pieces, except they don’t seem to come apart – they seem rather more joined up than they really should be, until you notice that the edges aren’t particularly square, which results in them forming a bit of a spiral – in fact, just enough of a spiral to stop you from getting the darn pieces apart ... Hmmm, nice ... 

OK, so as puzzles go, it’s not going to stop a hardened puzzler for very long, but it’s cute, and it’ll entertain non-puzzlers for a while – in fact it’s one of my old favourites for giving someone to fiddle with if they look a bit intimidated by some of the more complicated looking puzzles – who can resist a 4-piece jigsaw, after all? 

Cool thing is that they seem to pop up all over the place – in different materials – I found the wooden one online recently and couldn’t resist adding it to the hoard and the Hanayama Cast Spiral takes the same concept to another plane altogether ... not just by adding an extra piece and changing the shapes, but being made from cast metal, the tolerances are pretty fine and you need to get things just so before making your move – as a result, your chances of fluking a solution are reasonably small.

... a couple of variations on an interesting theme...

Tangler

This was another of my Cubic Dissection finds. It’s a Tom Jolly design made by Eric Fuller from curly maple. 

It’s made up of two pieces in a 4*4*4 cube shape, interlocked, but with plenty of space in there. The object is to separate the two pieces and put them back together again.  Without using any force, i.e. if it doesn’t feel like that will work, it won’t - STOP. 

When you first start playing around with the Tangler, there’s plenty to do ... and usually with this sort of puzzle, wandering around aimlessly will teach you a bit about what you can and can’t do, and even sometimes see you solving it ... or not!

  

It’s a delightfully simple looking puzzle, with no moving parts and clearly those two bits of wood must be able to come apart – he didn’t build it like that, surely! [Although the latter might become quite a popular theory after some further exploration.]

There’s a bit of a twist to this puzzle, and it’ll probably not surprise you to find that building it in burr tools will confirm that the eventual assembly is indeed made up of the two parts that you have in your hands, but sadly, it’s not possible to assemble them ... (!)

Solving this one requires some out-the-box thinking and knowing where and when to apply it, as the amount of movement available means there is plenty of scope for blind alleys and dead ends. 

So far everyone who’s played with this one has enjoyed it ... so it must be good!