Construction blitz…

I’ve always enjoyed assembling kits – before puzzles it was model aircraft and hairy-choppers – those were truly the gift that kept on giving with the need to rebuild and repair when ambition exceeded altitude and airspeed… but having left that hobby behind for a far cheaper one (let’s see if I get away with leaving that one out there) in the form of puzzles, I don’t get my assembly-fix quite as often… I’ve blogged about my Karakuri kits before but recently I’ve ordered a few of the NKD kits and they’ve supplied several weeks of my assembly-fix.

A while back I assembled the Silver City Luxe kit and found the process of gluing the little bits of veneer on at the end really tedious – in the end my copy of the puzzle looked presentable – but definitely not up to close scrutiny – it was obvious that it had been built by someone with more enthusiasm than skillz…

In spite of that I ordered a copy of the Luxe version of the Scriptum Cube and Mecanigma as well… and over the past couple of months I’ve been working my way through assembling those.

The carcasses go together really well – the laser-cutting is all spot-on and very few of the pieces were so tight they needed a bit of fettling. The innards of the Scriptum Cube go together quite quickly and as long as you follow the instructions carefully you should get everything right first time… I ended up with just one bit that (still) doesn’t quite work properly – but as it’s an internal bit that’s only really there to hide some of the guts, I’m not losing much sleep over it… and some point I’ll work out why it doesn’t fit where it should…

Once the carcass is built, you have the joys of the veneer to apply… but this time the good folks at NKD have switched from PVA wood glue to gel superglue – which gives you about 10 seconds to get things properly positioned and apply some pressure to secure it in place and literally 20 seconds later you’re onto the next piece safe in the knowledge that piece isn’t going anywhere fast…. Sure you need to be careful about where the gel goes, but if you’re careful you don’t HAVE to glue yourself to your project – that bit’s optional.

The veneer on this one ended up taking me a bit longer than the rest of the assembly, and once again my copy’s not going to win any beauty contests, but it’s perfectly functional and looks good enough at a distance!

Oh yeah, and it’s a cute puzzle too – obviously if you’ve built the thing, you know exactly how it all works, but I suspect it’ll amuse a few puzzlers when they eventually start dribbling back to Barnt Green at some point in the future.

Mecanigma is an interesting combination of some very cleverly-engineered laser-cut ply and lots of 3D printed pieces. You start out by applying several thin coats of wood stain to the ply sheets before starting with creating a huge number of sub-assemblies and the main carcass. Once you’ve used up most of the wooden bits you being to combine the 3D-printed bits and the sub-assemblies into some wonderfully interesting mechanisms…

You work your way around each of the faces in turn, pausing to make sure that all of the mechanical bits are working properly and interact reliably with those on the previous sides before moving onto the next side… (Word to the wise: take your time on this bit and make sure the mechanisms are all silky smooth – it’s a LOT easier to do that now than to try and do it when there’s a lot more hanging going off the carcass.)

Again, once you get to the end of the assembly process you’re pretty familiar with the mechanical bits of the puzzle, and you’ll have had to check the puzzle-y bits as well so it’s not going to take you long to solve it – given that all of the mechanics are out there in full view it does make for an impressive mechanical contraption – with a bit of puzzling thrown in for good measure.

If you want a pretty puzzle, give the good folks at NKD your money and get them to build it for you – they’re going to do a better job than most puzzlers I know… but if you need the occasional assembly-fix like I do, then they provide plenty of building pleasure with a good dose of sense of achievement - AND you end up with a puzzle box for your mates to play with.

 

Yes, I challenged myself to get the word carcass in there 5 times… I’m a bad person.

Pennytentiary

Not only a great play on words, it’s also an excellent puzzle!

This compact little sequential discovery puzzle from Eric Fuller packs a shed-load of puzzling into a tiny form factor – by my reckoning, several weeks’ worth of puzzling – ‘cos that’s how long it spent on my desk staring at me while I singularly failed to solve it. Several times I showed it to my mates on our weekly Zoom calls. Mostly to confirm that I had still made absolutely no progress. They didn’t mock me, much…

Right, so what have we got here?

I reckon it’s about three inches square and about an inch deep… you can see the four screws that appear to be holding all those neat little layers of wood and acrylic together so I won’t describe them (oops!). There’s a keyhole shaped opening on one side and there’s what looks like a penny trapped inside… trapped by at least four sliding metal bars that gravity dictates will pretty much always block the little coin’s escape…

And this is where the fun begins… Eric knows that as soon as you see this little set up, you’re going to all do the same thing – so you might as well do it and get it over and done with, I mean, you never know – it might actually help… SPOILER ALERT – it doesn’t!

After that I tried wiggling things – anything I could find – and that got me literally nowhere as well… and that was pretty much the state of my progress for several weeks. (Yup, not the sharpest knife in the drawer!)

This past weekend I tried something I hadn’t tried before, and something happened that hadn’t happened before – and I thought to myself that that might actually be useful… and it was – not only did it give me a new sense of purpose, it also gave me something to work with…

Little did I realise that that was literally just the beginning, and this little guy held a whole lot more secrets to conquer – all the way through there were reminders that Eric was playing puppet-master – giving a little with one hand and then slapping you across the face with the other – sorry, that’s another blog altogether – but the man teases you and plays with your emotions – he makes you think you’re almost there, and then laughs in your face when you realise there’s something else to solve…

This one really does keep on challenging you and surprising you all the way through the solve – there are some “What the heck?!” moments and a few “You bastard!” moments… all crammed into three inches squared. And if you’re as bad at solving them as I am, you can look forward to several weeks of puzzling value!

If you didn’t get one from the last release, you really ought to try and grab one this time around!

Ziggurat

I thought Ziggurat looked interesting when I first spotted it in the 2021 Design Competition, so when Eitan announced on Facebook that he would be making copies available for sale, I asked for my name to be added to the list of keen puzzlers wanting to acquire a copy.

Eitan had three versions available [over here] – a two-coloured version, a multi-coloured version (you pick the colours) and a rainbow-coloured version – I rather liked the standard rainbow pattern so opted for that one and a couple of weeks later the vagaries of the post(?)-COVID international postal system delivered a carefully packaged puzzle to my doorstep.

Ziggurat was designed by Eitan Cher and Bram Cohen and a quick squizz at the pieces will have you convinced that this is an n-ary puzzle… and you’d be right – but this n-ary puzzle is special: almost every other n-ary puzzle know to man relies on some form of cage or frame for the pieces to interact around… Ziggurat dispenses with the frame!

All of the interaction-enforcement is handled by the rather cleverly designed pieces themselves… and the really mind-blowing bit is that it’s all done with a single pair of handed piece designs – the engineering is very clever!

Eitan ships the puzzles with a stack of 6 pieces already threaded and mounted on a stand so that it displays rather neatly… and there are another two pieces shipped separately… so you have to play with the puzzle to add those last two pieces… and that’s going to involve learning how the pieces interact and how you introduce new pieces to the stack.

I won’t tell you how long it took me to work out how to remove the stack from the stand, because that would just be embarrassing…<quite a while!>

When I did get the stack free it was pretty clear where you needed to start, and having made a few moves you can start to see how the pieces interact – I find it helps if you keep a mental image of the direction of the outermost piece you’re currently moving, that way if you find yourself unexpected coming back the other way, you can recognise it early on and not just end up right back at the beginning. (Yup, got that t-shirt!)

Soon enough you find the rhythm of this n-ary delight and you can work your way around at will…

Of course you really do need to add those two additional pieces and close it all back up again… and even when you’ve done that, you’re still not really done… you see those pieces can also be assembled the other way around – so instead of starting with, say, a left-handed piece, you could start with a right-handed piece… and in theory all the moves are simply mirrored… unless of course your brain is now hard-wired in a particular handed-ness – and in that case you’re going to find it a little trickier…(Yup, got that t-shirt, too!)

It really is a clever design that strips the idea right back to the barest of bones and leaves just be the best bits to be played with.

Turning Quarter Hole

Another excellent puzzle from the mind of Hajime Katsumoto and the fair hands of Mine-san.

It’s beautifully open and honest – the name even describes it all pretty accurately: put the pieces into the box through the one quarter hole in the rotating cover. The interior of the box is two cubies high and the corners of the square box are cut off at 45 degrees to remove the corner cubies – leaving an octagon-ish space to be filled.

You’re told that the aim is to insert the three pairs of pieces to form a cross-shape inside the box, and a little experimentation outside of the box soon shows you that there are plenty of ways to do that… so far so good…

However, when you seek to transfer that construction into the box you begin to realise just how restrictive that opening really is… it only lets pieces go in in one way. Helpfully there are plenty of little finger holes to help manoeuvre your bits around inside, but there’s only so much you can do with the little opening.

The good news is that experimentation is richly rewarded in this little packer, and there are a few unintuitive things that you’ll find might be quite useful…

Then of course it’s just down to finding the most suitable assembly and working out how the heck to get it all inside. There might well be an obvious last piece to go in, but you’ll find that the order of some of the preceding steps might need more than a little thought as well.

I really like the fact that you need to use your wits on this one, it’s not just about bashing through all the possible assemblies – it’s also about experimentation and learning.

Thank you Mine-san for bringing this great design to life!

Brian Young’s Twisted’s Sister

(Yes, that’s perfectly punctuated!)

I’ve been after a copy of this puzzle for a while now so I was really chuffed when I managed to find a copy at a reasonable price recently. What makes this puzzle really stand out is its presentation: designed to be used as Brian’s exchange for IPP24 in Tokyo, the stand for the disentanglement puzzle resembles a classic Japanese torii, or archway – and I suspect that this little extra probably took as much, if not more effort than making the actual puzzle bits… the effort’s really worthwhile in my humble opinion as it makes this puzzle instantly recognisable.

The disentanglement puzzle itself consists of a pair of identical bent nails joined at the hip. Clearly they’ve been carefully doctored to get them into this situation – nails don’t normally come in gold, do they? Oh, and they’re rather bent!

Fiddling with them produces remarkably few available moves – and even though it might look familiar when you first pick this puzzle up, you’ll soon realise there are a few variants and this one’s different… in fact the difference comes from a discovery while Brian was making up another puzzle altogether.

You’ll solve it eventually but hopefully you’ll have the same “That’s clever!” reaction that I had when I first played with this copy…

Definitely one of the most beautifully presented disentanglements around… and a mighty fine puzzle too! 

 

Feuerzeug

With Wil’s recent success at encouraging Roger D back into the puzzle-making (and designing!) game, I patiently joined the queue for a copy of Feuerzeug as I hadn’t previously managed to find one for sale at what I considered a reasonable price.

Patience paid off and a handsome new copy duly arrived in Barnt Green – I was well-chuffed!

Feuerzeug is German for “lighter” – which should probably be obvious from the accompanying pics as the little brass and aluminium gadget looks just like a lighter with a flame coming out of it. Your goal is to release the flame – which sounds innocuous enough. Achieving said release is less so…

The brass flame is clearly going to come out at some point – it wiggles ever so slightly, but cannot be yanked out – feel free to try! The only other feature (apart from the “F” logo between the initials “RD”) is a recessed hex bolt which doesn’t seem interested in much at all.

Shaking and tilting the puzzle suggests there might be something else at play inside, but how the heck you use that information to release the flipping flame, is a mighty large puzzle.

It turns out that some fancy footwork will cause some magic to happen and then you can inveigle something useful to take place which will in turn cause the puzzle to levitate and make breakfast, releasing the flame in the process… some of that might be true – but the flame can definitely be (fully) released… your mission, should you choose to accept it…

It’s a classic!

VMPP IIIX

This past Saturday saw our seventh virtual Midlands Puzzle Party, or VMPP IIIX in my tradition of messing around with Roman Numerals. (It started out innocently enough…)

Pantazis had come to my rescue offering not only an updated tour of his puzzle museum on the idyllic Greek island, but he also wanted to treat us to a lecture on the recent discoveries from his research into Archimedes’ Ostomachion. I split those two events events across the morning and afternoon sessions, with another of Frank’s Awesome Quizzes (FAQs?) slated for the evening session. (It’s traditionally the latest session to allow Frank as much time as possible to come up with enough questions…)

We kicked off the morning session with some gentle greetings and Pantazis showing us a few new combinatorics designs he’d been working on... two of which made my head hurt just thinking about how hard they would be. Once he’d mastered the wonders of technology Pantazis took us on a tour of his puzzle museum – starting at the front door proclaiming that the house was built in July 1887(!). The sympathetically restored dwelling now houses a puzzle museum where the aim is to encourage people to play with the exhibits… several of which are highly collectible.

Pantazis walked us around the rooms pausing to show us the odd extremely rare puzzle, or point out some of his particular favourites. It’s fair to say that some of the puzzles just waiting to be played with are probably unique… and most would be highly sought after by serious collectors – but for Pantazis, it’s clear that he just wants people to be able to enjoy them.

Several times during the tour he entreated the listening puzzlists to plan a trip to his idyllic little island with promises of walks in the beautiful surrounding countryside, swimming in the gorgeous warm ocean (without any creatures that wanted to kill you, unlike those in Australia - that seemed to come up quite a bit in the latter sessions – for the record, Brian just smiled).

Pantazis' enthusiasm and delight at telling us about his (now) annual puzzle event is part of the local festivities is plain to see – he’s clearly on a mission to win friends for his puzzles.

After the tour we launched into our first round of 2 Truths and a Lie (2TL, ‘cos I’m lazy!) – we asked three volunteers to tell us three “facts” about themselves, one of which was a lie, and then invited the audience to quiz them in the hopes of uncovering the lie… after the interrogation a quick Zoom poll and a final confession would establish what proportion of the audience has been successfully misled and we had ourselves a little competition.

Brian kicked us off and performed (too) respectably, with most people spotting (or guessing his lie).  Clive went next and had us all literally crying with laughter – you really do need to watch it yourself as I won’t be able to do it justice in a family-rated blog post – but please be warned: don’t watch this in the workplace or indeed near anyone who’s moderately easily offended… you will laugh yourself silly though. Clive was clearly better at telling porkies than Brian.

Next up was Steve, and we played his round a little differently – he’d given me some truths and I gave him the lie at the same time as everyone else saw the statements for the first time, and then expected him to defend them all under a veritable barrage of interrogation. It’s worth teeing up the video just to hear about his trolley-flying antics – how he didn’t kill himself I don’t know… Gill’s favourite bit: hearing about the dog’s name being spot, and his other pet being a rabbit called Stu. Sadly I fear I may have put Steve at too much of a disadvantage judging by his score… but we all had fun and frankly, that was the intention!

The afternoon session started with a couple of quick puzzle recommendations before we headed into the main event - Pantazis talking about his research into Archimedes’ Ostomachion. For those of you not familiar with it, it’s an ancient dissection of a square that has a number of solutions and some interesting properties…

Pantazis’ research has combined his love of mathematics with his keen interest in Ancient Greek – something he needed regularly to makes sense of the historic texts and fragments he ended up researching and comparing in order to understand the puzzle. It seems there are a few different versions of the dissection, some of which appeared to be pretty arbitrary – leading Pantazis to posit an alternative dissection that satisfies all of the constraints described in the ancient texts, but produces a “cleaner” set of pieces which dispenses with the arbitrary nature of some of the cuts… which is interesting… (©LB)

The bit that really grabbed my attention was when Pantazis introduced a means of measuring difficulty of the solutions based on the number of maximal cuts visible in the solution… with the hardest solution having no maximal cuts… I thought that was a really clever way of thinking about difficulty in this context…

Given the mathematical bent of a number of folks on the call (where else is there going to be a serious discussion of "your favourite equation" going to make perfect sense?!) and Pantazis' clear enthusiasm for the topic, the talk went down really well – Thanks for sharing a bit of your clear passion with us, Pantazis!

After the lecture we lowered the tone with another round of 2TL, giving Nigel, Mike, Pantazis and Marc the opportunity to lie to their friends around the world. This time we heard about Nigel getting knocked down by Muhammad Ali, Mike’s gourmet gobbling buddy, Pantazis’ Hoff-baiting exploits and Marc’s cruciverbalist streak… once again – all good for a laugh!

The evening session started with four more pants-on-fire puzzlers in the shape of Rik, Steve, Haym and Ali. This time we had to contend with someone shaving the mayors’ nuts, driving across Europe with a broken arm, serving Bill Gates a Diet Coke and trying to get a push from the police when way too young to drive. Perhaps it was the time of the day, or the inspiration of earlier competitors, but the standard of lying had definitely clicked up a notch in the evening session, with scores being dramatically better until Haym was crowned the best liar of the bunch – you’ve been warned: don’t play poker with the man!

After declaring Haym the winner (mental note: must send him a prize!) we handed over to Frank for the eagerly anticipated quiz. As always Frank had not only come up with some great new rounds, he’d put in a huge effort on the questions.

Round one was a Wordle-style challenge where the clues were given Wordle-style and you had to work out what the answers were from the letters you could and couldn’t use… fiendishly good!

There was a round of place names where the simple question was "Is this place in the USA, the UK or in New Zeeland?" (in deference to Steve’s current position…) – I think I managed to score only slightly above the expected level of 33% for that round … and then I did very badly in the dad-joke round – but somehow I managed to come in second place to the Nick-ster – so I immediately disqualified myself on the grounds that I’d actually seen one of the questions beforehand when Frank needed an opinion on whether a question was too hard – I managed to solve it so he made it slightly harder! :-)

After the quiz there was a little wind-down chatter and some more last-night-in-the-pub-at-IPP-vibes where it seemed that folks didn’t really want to say goodbye… which was kinda nice to see – it’s almost like we done a good thing here…

Thanks a stack to Pantazis for all of the presenting and enthusiasm he imparted, and to all of our 2TL contestants, and a huge thank you to Frank for FAQ!

 [I couldn't resist sharing my favourite Wordle-style puzzles from Frank...]

Links to the recordings of the sessions: 

Morning Session

Afternoon Session

Evening Session

Wine Not

 Last year Gill managed to track down an incredible surprise for my birthday – she colluded with friends of ours to get me a copy of Brian’s 1998 limited edition Wine Not. (Yup, she’s amazing!)

Over the years I’ve been trying to plug some of the many gaps in my collection of Brian’s puzzles, but there are some that really don’t come up for sale very often… Wine Not is one of those! Hardly surprising given that he only made a dozen copies, and that was about 23 years ago!

Wine Not is Brian’s riff on a two-dimensional design in EM Wyatt’s classic Puzzles in Wood. Wyatt’s version consisted of a pair of interlinked squares called Locked Links. Brian’s trades the squares for cubes and results in a structure that looks remarkably like a wine rack, unless you look at it closely, at which point you realise there’s actually no place for the wine bottles to go, given the overlap between the cubes…

The puzzle starts out as a fairly large pile of sticks – neatly a dozen in Queensland Walnut and another dozen in Queensland Silver Ash… examining the sticks shows your that there are definite sets of similar pieces and some of there are a little unusual which provides a bit of a clue as to how the structure goes together…

Decide on a strategy and begin to piece things together, and as long as you’ve thought things through properly, you should find you can end up with a pair of neatly interlocked cubes without having to resort to bending the pieces. [Spoiler Alert: Brian’s bits don’t bend!]

Definitely a statement piece in the collection now. This one stands proud among most of Brian’s creations – not just because of it’s size. :-)

Thanks Gill and Sue for all the collusion and spoiling me rotten for my birthday last year!

Axes and Hammer

Let me start by making one thing absolutely clear: I am rubbish at disentanglements!

Yet, for some reason, I decided that I rather liked the looks of Axes and Hammer when it was entered in the 2020 Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition. Some time later I reached out to the designer and managed to acquire a copy… albeit the wonders of the pandemic and its impact on the international postal system meant that I had to be a little mor patient than usual while it wended its way from China to little old Barnt Green – but wend, it did, and I was delighted with the quality of this little guy.

The axes have a nice shape and profile and the hammer is pleasingly solid – marry that with the not insubstantial chain, and you have a puzzle that is not going to allow you to do anything that you absolutely shouldn’t be able to…

At first glance, Axes and Hammer looks like a standard disentanglement – do something where you wouldn’t normally expect to do it, and Hey Presto, the ring’s free! Although knowing that it’s been accepted into the design competition lets you know immediately that it’s not going to be nearly that simple!

And it isn’t… in fact it’s rather tricky – and relies on the puzzler noticing a few little details made possible by some neatly designed features and pretty good tolerances… in fact, there’s one part of the solution that is very fussy indeed – if you don’t approach things absolutely perfectly, you’ll be convinced it’s not going to work… and duly shift your attention elsewhere.

This one’s definitely a puzzlers’ puzzle, in my humble opinion… one for someone who thinks they know what to do and is open to a little lesson in humility from a talented designer… this one doesn’t suffer fools and demands you pay attention to the details, or you end up going round and round in circles. (Yup, got that t-shirt!)  

 

Loki

I was one of those folks who signed up for Boaz’s announcements so that I’d know as soon as Loki was available… and ordered one as soon as it became available… and it arrived soon afterwards.

However, since it took me virtually two months of trying to solve it, on and off, this blog post is only seeing the light of day now… well after most people will have bought it, and solved it, and told everyone else they liked it… but here I am anyway, ‘cos it earned my respect… lots of it!

Boaz has impeccable pedigree when it comes to puzzle locks – his dad is almost certainly the undisputed king of modified lock puzzles – everybody rates them by how they compare with the Danlock. Boaz himself has produced some excellent modified lock puzzles using some wonderfully imaginative ideas in the form of BLock and BLock II… so when he announced that he was particularly proud of Loki, we all expected something a little special.

Boaz did not disappoint.

Loki is indeed the very king of tricksters – fooling you at literally every turn – never letting you make much progress without dropping another massive roadblock in your path… and even when you might be tempted to think you’re done, you’re only halfway, trust me!

I suspect that like most folks I made a bit of progress quite quickly – and that little bit had me impressed from the get-go. There is some very classy machining involved here. From there I hit a roadblock that literally stopped me for more than a month… I had some theories about how I needed to progress, but I couldn’t work out how the heck to make them work… until a massive “A-Ha!” struck, ironically as I was describing what I wanted to do to a fellow puzzler – Nigel’s a patient listener!

Finding how to execute that plan, with all its little tricks took another week or two and that gave me what felt like a massive step forward – except Loki’s tricks baffled me once more and it took another few days before I finally had the shackle out!

Hurrah! Cue sense of achievement and victory photographs…

…only to be thoroughly crushed when I tried to reset things, and realised that they wouldn’t work the way I wanted them to…

Fast forward another week or two or experimenting this way and that, including making life very difficult for myself in search of a feasible reassembly path… so I did me a THINK (c) and simplified things, and found a way through the morass and had everything back where it had started… leaving me with a profound respect for this little trickster and the cunning man behind it.

As a puzzler you might have seen one or two of the ticks somewhere else, but there are several you’ve never seen anywhere before, and you have absolutely never seen that many of them all in one neat little NABOB-sized package before.

Boaz, you are your father's son and you ought to be extremely proud of this puzzle.