I first had a glimpse of the Currency R&R a while back as pictures of the puzzle were posted by Rex (and I think Stan as well) on their respective Facebook feeds after the design first emerged.  It looked like a real tough packing puzzle and then, I was pretty sure it was. What was also really interesting was the design theme. Rex and Stan had designed the pieces to resemble currency symbols. There are 5 currencies used here. They are the Dollar, Japanese Yen, Spanish Peseta,  Euro and British Pound. The angular shapes of the pieces forming the currencies are nicely executed and look like the real thing.

Now what people do not know is that the Currency R&R started as R&S (Rex & Stanislav). Initially conceived in 2015 as a sliding block cum packing puzzle by Rex, the two gents worked on it as a sliding puzzle.But during this time, Stan also came up with a simple packing design which eventually resulted in the Currency puzzle that we know today. I am not sure what the second “R” in “R&R” stands for tho”. Was it a typo error?

Fast forward sometime to 2017 and at the IPP37 Puzzle Exchange in Paris, I got a copy of the Currency R&R in my hands. Exchanged by Frans De Vreugd. Frans had seen the puzzle and requested it for his exchange puzzle. The puzzle is made out of laser cut acrylic with coloured symbols and the tray consists of two sides both which can be used. Construction and fit is perfect and the puzzle is very well cut.

One 2d packing challenge becomes Five 

The Currency R&R had been “modded” by Frans to include more challenges than the original design. The original version was just to pack the 5 currency symbols into the tray. The new challenges include 1) Packing the 5 symbols into a modified (tighter) tray (the side with with the etchings). And using a combination of 4, 3 and 2 symbols, pack the pieces into the tray such that none of the pieces can slide (anti-slide puzzle). The latter challenges had multiple solutions while the two traditional packing ones each had a unique solution.

Depending on the design, a 5 piece packing puzzle can be moderately difficult, difficult or very challenging, but rarely easy. My personal take on the Currency R&R is that the puzzle straddles somewhere in between difficult and very difficult, but leaning  more towards difficult. While its hard no doubt, I would not say its frustratingly hard. Or perhaps it was just my good luck the day when I played with it! Both challenges took me about forty minutes in total.

For this particular design, a bit of thinking and careful observation would also help in the solve. Particularly paying attention to the shape of each piece and how they might interact with each other inside the tray. I don’t want to say more to avoid spoilers. The remaining anti slide challenges (using a combination of pieces) were not too difficult and I could manage almost all of them. Especially after my experience with Gridlock at the Arc De Triomphe.

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Gridlock was Jerry Slocum’s IPP37 Exchange Puzzle at Paris last year. A nice soft spoken elderly gentleman whom I have had the great pleasure of meeting since I started attending IPPs in 2013. Jerry Slocum is the “founder” of the IPP,  first established 30 years ago, back in 1978 . He hosted the first gathering in the living room of his Californian home for a handful of collectors. Since then, the modern IPP today has grown in numbers and today, attendance at each event is anywhere between 400 to 500 people, hosted in different countries around the planet. For some history of the IPP and other interesting facts, click here.

anti slide or anti solution?

The Gridlock was the combined brian child of three persons; Brian Young, Junichi Yananose and William Hu. How did three guys come together to design something like that? Well, according to Sue Young (Brian’s wife), she said that “the puzzle started out as William’s idea. But it didn’t work properly. At that time Juno (Junichi) was working here with us and him and Brian started playing with it and over time it ended up looking like something quite different. But all 3 guys had a hand in the final product so that’s how we put the designers down”.

There is nothing very unusual in the physical look and feel of the Gridlock. The puzzle consists of a tray with 6 pieces, the latter which look pretty simple and ordinary as well. All made of acrylic.  Construction, fit and finish of the puzzle is pretty decent. The tray (and pieces) have all the details of the puzzle etched onto them. Gridlock was produced by Mr Puzzle of Australia.

The goal of this anti slide puzzle is as what it’s name suggest. To place the 6 pieces into the tray in such a way that not a single piece will slide in any direction within the tray. If you look at the solution of AntiSlide Tetramino mentioned above, you will understand what I mean by not being able to slide in any direction.

Like I mentioned, I (severely) underestimated the level of difficulty of the puzzle. The initial hours (yes, hours, not minutes) I spent on this puzzle yielded only one solution which I thought to be the correct one. Unfortunately, upon checking with Brian (and Sue), it was apparently very close but not quite. Brian and Sue even sent me photos of some rather outrageous solutions from other puzzlers (no names mentioned) which I must admit were rather ingenious, if a bit off-tracked.

The next several days I emailed to Sue and Brian a further two solutions I came up with. But as luck would have it, they were both still not the intended solution. I must state at this point that the correct/intended solution is the one the puzzle exchanger or designer submits for the IPP Exchange Puzzle Book. This book features all the exchange puzzles with puzzles and solutions, names etc for each particular IPP.

As of the date of this post, I am still trying to figure out the correct way the pieces fit inside the tray. I am still no nearer than when I first started. I mean, how many ways can there be to fit the pieces into the tray without sliding? Below are three of what I thought were the solutions for Gridlock…which are ALL INCORRECT.

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Swiss Cheese Puzzle

Like your typical packing puzzle, the Swiss Cheese puzzle came in a regular shaped tray and 5 pieces. But with an interesting theme. The cheeses were a combination of different shapes with holes and half-holes  and hiding at the top left corner in its own recess was the little mouse. The Swiss Cheese is made  from laser cut Red Alder and Walnut wood. Quality of construction, fit and finish is very good. And after you have solved the puzzle, you will also realise that the tolerances are very tight. The mouse just fits nicely within the tray with the rest of the pieces. The back of the puzzle has the starting position of the pieces etched into the surface and other accompanying text. This is just in case like me, you can’t solve it and have to transport the puzzle around.

Waite’s design was inspired by and pays homage to an earlier mouse/cheese puzzle designed by Vladimir Krasnoukhov, which has 5 pieces of cheese and a mouse. There is also one other puzzle bearing the cheese/mouse theme that I am aware of, the Quattro Formaggi designed by Jean Claude Constantin.

Che(Easy) Solve? 

Now, the goal is obvious; place the mouse and the four cheese pieces flat into the tray. With only four pieces which don’t look too out of the ordinary, I didn’t think the puzzle would be beyond me. But I should have known that a William Waite designed puzzle cannot be that easy.  On his site, William says this the Swiss Cheese is “filled with red herrings to lead you astray, this puzzle consistently resists efforts even to fit the 4 pieces of cheese in the square at all”

I struggled for quite a few days on this one before finally throwing in the towel. Afterall I have a lot of puzzles (exchange and  others) still to go through. I emailed William for the solution and I am glad he didn’t give it to me outright. Instead he gave me a clue, which on hindsight I should have asked him in the first place!

Surprising even myself, with his clue, I solved the Swiss Cheese in under  a minute. All this while the pieces were staring back at me and I was led astray thinking there was only one possibility of a solution. Yes the damn red herrings! I didn’t consider the other possible alternatives. Hmm…lesson learnt for other packing puzzles on their way. But the final solution with mouse in its resting place looks very cool and you will wonder how the pieces can fit in the way they do! For those interested, you can contact William Waite via his website.

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Design-wise, the YACP is pretty far removed from the usual 2D packing puzzles with its whimsical shaped pieces and the non-use of the linear style we puzzlers are so accustomed to. The YACP consists of a black tray about 9.5cm square with five clovers of different colours as well as a small gray rectangular piece. All acrylic laser cut to exacting standards. Quality of construction, fit and finish is excellent and each of the clovers have a small knob attached for easy handling. Aesthetically the YCAP is pleasing to the eye with the clovers adorning bright colours.  And I must say, having played with the YACP for the good part of an hour, the tolerances between the pieces is very tight indeed.

The object of the YACP is to place the five clovers flat in the tray AND also fit the rectangular piece inside a channel on one of the sides. The tray contains cutouts for each of the clovers, all of which look deceptively similar but with very subtle differences. I wonder if Rik had used some form of software to design this puzzle because those little differences meant I had a number of misses; everything would all fit in nicely including the rectangular piece but the last clover would just not fit into its slot.

One can randomly try all the possible combinations (which I would imagine run into the hundreds) of clovers and rectangle and with persistence, time and luck, eventually arrive at the solution.  This obviously could take a very long time, without the hint of the solution in sight. However, I would suggest that with a bit of logical thinking and experimenting, one can eliminate certain possibilities in terms of the placement of the clovers and solve the puzzle much sooner. At least that’s how I managed to solve the YACP in about 40 minutes.

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The IPPA is the IPP37 Exchange Puzzle of Juozas Granskas of Lithuania, whom I had the pleasure of meeting the first time last year. The IPPA is not your typical packing puzzle which forces you to fit a certain number of pieces within the confines of a tray. Rather, the design requires the puzzler to arrange the pieces into the tray to form a certain shape or cover certain parts. In this regards, Juozas has designed the IPPA using an “international” airports theme. The object is to fit the five hexaminoes (a piece with 6 units) into the tray, leaving uncovered only three empty cells plus the IATA code letters of selected airports. In some ways, it is similar to Lixy Yamada’s 2016 8 August puzzle reviewed earlier, but with a different theme. Dimensionally it is 11cm x 10cm x 0.8cm.

As you can see from the photo, a number of the major airports around the world are included, giving it a total of 17 challenges. Too bad Singapore Changi International Airport (SIN) was not included (the latter being one of the best in the world).

Update 5 Feb 2018: Tyler Somer, a puzzler from Canada emailed me the following which explains why Singapore was not on the puzzle and how the list came to be formed. “….. the list of airports is a summary of the locations of the International Puzzle Parties, up to this point, with the exception of Ottawa. I recall that Juozas was disappointed that he was not able to arrange the grid to include Ottawa, but the reason for this difficulty is that the Ottawa airport “YOW” would require 2 more letters. He had to choose either “NRT” or “YOW” but could not include both, as both of these would introduce 2 unique letters to the grid — all other airport codes use repeated letters, or at most 1 unique letter. (With no IPP yet in Singapore, its airport code is not included in the list of challenges.)…”

Apart from the  17 airport challenges for the IPPA, Juozas has also added a bonus challenge; that is, to arrange the 5 pieces inside the tray to leave space for a 6th hexamino.  As IPP37 was held in Paris, I thought I would try finding the answer for CDG (Charles De Gaulle Airport). Not too difficult to solve, since you can keep trying various combinations of adjusting and rearranging the pieces until you leave the letters C, D and G uncovered. Next I tried LAX and got the solution pretty fast.  I didn’t bother with the rest but instead went to the bonus challenge. However this bonus puzzle was much harder since a hexamino can take  a variety of shapes; 35 possible shapes to be precise. The bonus task took more than several minutes but eventually I got it. There are two solutions but I didn’t attempt the second one.

Overall, the IPPA takes on a different design concept from the norm and adopts a rather interesting theme for play. Not too difficult and with more than enough challenges to keep you occupied for a good while, assuming you go through all 19 problems.

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The puzzle in question is The Melting Tile, which also happens to have been the IPP37 Exchange Puzzle of puzzle/puzzle books collector Yee Dian Lee of Malaysia. I would imagine most puzzlers would have heard of the famous Melting Block puzzle designed by Tom O’Beirne, which has seen different variants made by different puzzle craftsmen over the years. The Melting Block is a 3D packing puzzle that requires a puzzler to fit a ninth block into a box which already contains 8 other block pieces (of varying shapes) with no internal spaces/voids. Sounds impossible right? Yes and No. Bill Cutler describes it as such:

The Melting Block is more of a paradox then a puzzle. The eight pieces fit together easily to form a rectangular block 57 x 87 x 132. This fits into the box with a little room all around, but looks to the casual observer to fill up the box completely. When the ninth piece is added to the group, the pieces can be rearranged to make a 58 x 88 x 133 rectangular solid. (This second construction is a little more difficult). This is a great puzzle to show to “non-puzzle people” and is one of my favorites.

Goh Pit Khiam applied this same principle and came up instead with a 2D version the goal is to remove 7 pieces that fills a tray completely, rearrange them and fit in an 8th red piece…and completely fill up the tray again…again seemingly impossible. Quite a design feat I might add, and burr tools is not something you can use here for this sort of design.

When Oscar came to Singapore and we had an informal second Singapore Puzzle Party, Oscar played with The Melting Tile and managed to solve it over dinner. I decided to give my copy of this Exchange Puzzle a try, but (fortunately or unfortunately) with the benefit of knowing the hint for solving such a puzzle…which Oscar alluded to during his solve.

With a hint or not, this is one of those puzzles which can be solved with some persistence. Given the fact that it has only 7+1 red piece to fit into a squarish tray, it is not such an impossible task as one would imagine. Both solving and un-solving and placing the pieces back to where they belong doesprovide some degree of challenge, easy for some, difficult for others.  But notwithstanding, a nice puzzle to confound non-puzzlers and even puzzlers alike. I love it when people give that look of bewilderment on their faces when they see the small red piece fit inside the tray with the rest…”gosh, how’s that possible?”

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