7-Piece Nightmare

Everyone’s favourite Greek puzzle maker, Mike Toulouzas, recently put a copy of his 7-Piece Nightmare puzzle up for sale. He’d made a short run of them and had a spare copy or two and I was delighted to be able to snag one of them. 

7-Piece Nightmare was one of Mike’s entries in the 2005 Puzzle Design Competition in Helsinki. 

As you might expect from the name, there are seven pieces to be packed inside a neat little box with a lid on it. The pieces all consist of a number of half-squares glued together in a variety of configurations, so that in total you have three layers of 4 squares on each layer. Two of the pieces have triangles in three layers, with the remaining pieces spanning two layers each. The shapes are pretty funky and take a bit of getting used to…

Mike has alternated the colours of the triangles on the top and bottom so that you end up with either a chequerboard pattern or a windmill pattern on the faces (Iroko and Eucalyptus woods) … and the central layer is all a single colour. 

Mike describes the puzzle as surprisingly difficult – and with only seven pieces, it is rather tricky! 

I’m still not sure whether knowing that one side of the completed assembly is a chequerboard and the other has a windmill pattern actually helps or not – at the start of the solve, pretty much any piece could form part of either of those patterns, and it’s only after experimenting and wandering down a blind alley or two that you’re able to deduce the orientations of one or two key pieces. 

The search-space is dramatically reduced once you’ve got a few of the pieces together, but it’s still a long way from a trivial task to slot the final pieces together – the combinations he’s chosen seem to be particularly confusing (at least to this amateur puzzler!) and several times I’ve found myself only one or two pieces form the final solution and still not at all certain that I’m on the right track. 

As you’d expect from Mike’s work, the fit and finish is superb – the detailing on the box is stunning, from the decorative inlays around the corners to the detailing on the top of the handle on the lid. 

A beautiful object that also happens to be a great puzzle – it may only have 7 pieces, but I’ll wager it’ll give any puzzler a decent challenge – and if you don’t simply enjoy playing with the wonderful handiwork then there’s something wrong with you! :-)

Mindcuber - Quick Update

A little while back I wrote about my new Lego toy – a Mindcuber designed by David Gilday… for this non-twisty-guy, definitely the least painful way to solve a 3*3*3 Rubik’s Cube. 

David recently released a string of updates to the software (along with a version for the Educational kit) which have significantly improved the scanning speed, improved the solving algorithms and added the ability to solve directly to a number of patterns...

 … so now you can instruct this little contraption to give you:

• a cube with a snake around all six sides, 
• a chequerboard pattern, 
• six spots, 
• a cube-in-cube (my favourite) and 
• a Super-Flip pattern (every single edge piece is flipped 180 degrees – the stuff of nightmares for padawans like me!). 

 

If you’ve already got one made up, make sure you grab a copy of the new software, and if you’re considering building yourself one – it’s EVEN BETTER now!

Stickman #12 Cross Box

I was recently offered the chance to purchase this rather interesting little puzzle box. 

It didn’t take very long to decide that I wanted it.

Cash changed hands and it arrived at Puzzling Times HQ rather shortly thereafter. 

Cue many hours of happy puzzling. 

…and if this was a short blog post I could probably leave it there, but that would totally ignore the best bits…

Sure it looks gorgeous, and the pics will show you that – but I suspect that if you’re still reading you want to know more about it… so let’s start at the beginning:

The Cross Box was first released back in late 2006 when 30 of them were created by the Stick-meister. He declared them to be of moderate difficulty and sent them out into the world to confound puzzlers across the globe. 

Built largely of Bloodwood, it looks pretty unique with the upper half consisting of a frame that holds two layers of cubes in place with as little projecting into the sides as possible to allow the puzzler handy access to those walnut cubes. A quick examination of the frame will convince you that that cubes are never coming out of there, the best you can hope to achieve is to move them around a bit…

The bottom half of the puzzle has some gorgeous inlay work decorating all the sides and a little feeling your way soon suggests that there might be a drawer running through the bottom - only it’s locked firmly in place. Finish admiring the work around the bottom – love the feet and the detailed inlay in the corners themselves – and then shift attention back to the top of the puzzle.

There are seventeen cubes arranged in two layers of three by three, with a single gap somewhere… every block has some pins, some holes and a track or two on the sides… so they interfere with one another – not only that, they also interfere with the arms projecting up or down the sides and with that cross shape across the top of the frame…

 

So that’s interesting – Robert’s made it tough to move the cubes exactly where you want to, so maybe that’s a clue to what you’re going to have to do … surely he wouldn’t have done that just for a laugh, would he?

OK, so get the reading glasses out and spot a few more subtler clues and we’re off – we think we know what we need to do… except those pins and holes and tracks really do rather get in the way – quite a lot – so you end up having to think several steps ahead in order to manipulate things just right, and when you arrive at the first waypoint, there’s wonderfully satisfying click as the drawer in the bottom is released – SUCCESS!! So you pull open the drawer only to be greeted with another click – Uh Oh…

Great you are now trapped halfway – there are two secret compartments and you’ve found the first one… trouble is that the drawer is now locked open, until you find the second secret compartment… now I had a little difficulty finding the second one and my puzzle ended up half open for quite a while … it mocked me silently from the shelf – I’d have a bash every now and then only to have it mock me some more…

At some point I managed to get it opened fully and discovered that it was a wonderfully elegant reset mechanism – just shut the drawer and you’re done… right back to the start again…

I had a lot of fun inflicting this one on some puzzling mates who came visiting a little while later. As luck would have it, it was locked half-open again so I gave it to the solvers who duly spent a while moving blocks randomly, and not so randomly until at one point Steve was left holding a fully locked up puzzle – much to his own surprise he’d managed to unlock it and then just close it fully without taking the time to bask in the glory of having it totally opened. Of course it thoroughly resisted all further attempts to open it that day!

So much more than a three dimensional sliding tile puzzle – this one’s got some sneaky little tricks up its sleeve and it can be very tricky indeed … so methinks that Robert’s idea of Moderate Difficulty and mine are somewhat different – another great Stickman puzzlebox that I’m rather chuffed to have added to the little hoard in the cave at Puzzling Times HQ.

[...and thanks a stack to Robert for supplying a spare instruction booklet as my puzzle’s copy had gone astray somewhere over the intervening 8 years.]