For lovers of interlocking puzzles (and those of you who missed out on my Dirty Dozen), there is a Kickstarter project ongoing now which features two of my designs, the Dirty Dozen and L(8)tice. The third design Slideways, comes from Ray Stanton. All the puzzles are made of heavy aluminium and anodised in attractive orange, blue and magenta. Lovely to look at and challenging to solve.

I had produced a couple of dozen (no pun intended) copies of Dirty Dozen in stainless steel previously for sale in small batches and these were always sold out the moment I listed them on my e-shop here. Same for the L(8)tice which was manufactured in acrylic.

Here’s the link to the Kickstarter page. 

All three puzzles are very affordable, considering they are all produced in anodised aluminium. The Slideways is $20, while both the Dirty Dozen and L(8)tice are going for $25 each. If you buy all three puzzles, there is a package price of $66. Shipping and handling not included.

Both the above designs and their piece shapes are also featured on Puzzlewillbeplayed.com

http://puzzlewillbeplayed.com/CombCross/DirtyDozen.JL/

http://puzzlewillbeplayed.com/CombCross/Leighttice/

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I have known puzzle collector and designer Rex Rossano Perez from the Philippines for the last several years. Like most others who use social media, I got to know him via Facebook and within the puzzling community. From what I understand, Rex started with mainly twisties but eventually the dark side took over and he got into the “real” stuff. He also started designing puzzles and had a number of his designs uploaded to PWBP. Like me, he frequently used the triangular/hex format and came up with a number of unique and interesting designs. He has been producing 2D packing puzzles on and off. Most recently he came up with four new and interesting coin puzzles.

I am also very grateful to Rex for all his help in providing me with Corel, DWG and DXF files. These files enabled me to bring to life and manufacture a variety of my own designs. These have included a number of 2D packing puzzles and interlocking ones such as Dirty Dozen, L(8)-tice, Berro(skull) and Partitions (by Goh Pit Khiam).

Last week I received from Rex the four coin puzzles. He had started off designing the Rizal first. Then he added extra features to his next three designs, Aguinaldo, Barasoain and Kusing 25 . The puzzles went from the usual “free-the-coin” puzzles to sequential discovery puzzles.

Sequential Discovery puzzles are a class of puzzles where you have to use certain “tool(s)” that are incorporated within the puzzle to aid in solving the puzzle. Apart from these given tools, no other external tools or implements are allowed. All the four coin puzzles are produced from coloured acylic sheets. The layers of acrylic are screwed together at the four corners. They are all pretty compact in size. For example the smallest, Aquinaldo measures about 5.7cm x 5.7cm x 2cm (excluding the protrusions). Construction, fit and finish is excellent. On all my copies are precision cut and the moving parts all slide smoothly. Each of the puzzles carry a coin of different denomination, and the Filipino names of the puzzles reflect some famous person featured on the coins. All four puzzles have different mechanisms and solutions.

With my new puzzles in hand, I was wondering which one to start with. So I asked Rex to rank the puzzles in order of difficulty from the easiest to hardest. He indicated them as Rizal being the easiest and Kusing 25 the hardest. The other two were somewhere in between. I decided to try out both the easiest and hardest and leave the middle two for another day. So I got to work on Rizal. Being the easiest of the four, I quite quickly managed to extract the coin from the case. It was not difficult. But Rizal had a certain level of trickiness with a simple but elegant solution and minimal moving parts. It was fun to solve and easy to return the coin back in place. I took approximately about 5-6 minutes with Rizal.

Happy with my success with Rizal, I moved on to Kusing 25, the hardest of the four. Now this one was a different beast altogether. Knowing that it was a sequential discovery type puzzle, I set about searching for the necessary tools. It din’t take me long to find what I needed. But the tool was recessed in the puzzle in such a way that it took me more than a several moments to extract it.

It was obvious that the tool was needed to progress with the next steps. Without it you are stuck. Difficult to describe more here without giving away any spoilers. So I will just say the tool needs to work in conjunction with some other movements including the sliding plate. It took a fair amount of fiddling to free the coin. Much longer time needed than Rizal and a lot harder too. Whereas careful observation and thinking helped me to solve Rizal pretty quickly, Kusing 25 had a mechanism that was well hidden inside the layers that gave no clue whatsoever. A lot of parts seems to be moving and interacting with each other and I had little idea what was going on. A very much more complicated design than Rizal.

Not only that, I also had much difficulty returning the coin to its place. The coin kept wanting to come out of the box. The restraints which were supposed to lock the coin in place refused to work no matter what I did. In fact, at the time of this writing, I still have not succeeded in getting the puzzle back to its original state. I shot Rex a note to let him know that I was stuck in the current situation with the coin. He replied …”then that is the puzzle”. Now I know why its the most difficult of the four puzzles. The design genius of Rex is somewhere inside still waiting to be solved!

I am not sure what will be in store for me for Barasoain and Aquinaldo but from what I have experienced so far, I think they will be fun. If I can manage to fully solve Kusing 25, I think I wouldn’t have too much of a problem with these other two then….but until then. So far the two I have played with are great coin puzzles. They are well made and with a good level of challenge. For anyone who is interested to purchase, please PM me and I can link you up with Rex directly. Happy Puzzling for 2019!

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The GyroTwisty comprises an ABS plastic (the stuff for 3D printing) circular shell frame l which holds an inner ball. The object of the puzzle is to take apart the pieces and put them back together again. As with the previous Namdarian puzzle Sewing Box, the quality of the 3D printing and finishing here is very good. Tolerances are just right allowing the inner ball to rotate smoothly inside the outer circular frame. My copy of the puzzle looks really cute with a contrasting yellow and blue colour. Physically the puzzle is a nice size for the hands at around 8cm in diameter and about 6.5cm tall. Mine also came in a pinkish drawstring cloth pouch with leopard print.

This puzzle reminds me of Hanayama’s Cast Marble (which I don’t own nor have I played with) and also Peppermint designed by Scott Elliot. While the three puzzles share similar design cues, the solves have their own characteristics. Unlike Sewing Box and Peppermint which I struggled with it, I managed GyroTwisty pretty well. I took apart the puzzle in under 10 minutes and got all four pieces back together in a lesser time. Or maybe I just got lucky. I won’t say its very difficult but its certainly not an easy puzzle either. But I suppose with some persistence, it will pay off in the end as you fiddle the pieces.

There is a technique to the solve. Once I managed to line up the outer shell with the inner ball, which itself splits into two, the puzzle came apart quite easily. Really no force whatsoever is required.

For anyone interested to get a copy,  you can email Diniar via the IPP38 Puzzle Design Competition webpage. Yes, the GyroTwisty was also an entry to the competition. The puzzle costs a very reasonable 15 Euros plus S&H.

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The Sewing Box consists of an ABS plastic (the stuff for 3D printing) circular frame which holds six different coloured rods in place. Each of the rods consists of two parts split at varying lengths. The object of the Sewing Box is to remove the rods from the frame. Quality of the 3D printing and finishing is very good. The puzzle looks really nice with all that colour around the sides.

I think everyone would agree that the puzzle is very intriguing and enticing looking and begs to be played with. But the solving is a whole different ball game. I struggled with it for quite some time and got nowhere. The rods can rotate on their own axis and all six rods can also rotate around the frame. Eventually I asked Diniar for a clue. All he told me was that the rods are split at different heights (something which I already knew). Anyway, I persevered on. And through a rather painful process of trial and error, continuous sliding and twisting, I finally manage to dislodge the rods. I say dislodge because it seemed that several of the rods all came apart almost at the same instant. It was only then that I saw the “internal mechanism” of the Sewing Box. I like to think I got the rods out more by chance than systematic skill.

I took a fairly long time to solve, like nearly maybe an hour. Diniar mentioned that three other puzzlers, Jim Strayer, Kevin Sadler and Goetz Schwandtner all had taken apart the thing in only 15 minutes or so. Hey, these guys are experts…what do you expect?! Overall, I would say that the Sewing Box has quite a clever and rather very unique design concept, well executed via 3D printing production. Very challenging would be a bit of an understatement. Solving requires a fair bit of (lateral) thinking. And certainly quite a handful to be juggling so many pieces. I saw the official solution from Diniar. And yes, there is a “method” or rather technique to solving but it is difficult to discover. More suitable for the hardcore puzzle enthusiasts.

For anyone interested to get a copy (15 Euros plus S&H) and I would highly recommend the Sewing Box to those who relish a good challenge, you can email Diniar via the IPP38 Puzzle Design Competition webpage. Yes, the Sewing Box was also an entry to the competition, and the most colourful one!

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A while back, I had designed a 3D Skull using Burr Tools. I planned to use this design but there was only one (major) problem; I could only fabricate the steel pieces by laser cutting. Which meant that I could only cut on flat sheets of steel, not in 3D shapes like those done by CNC machining. Given this limitation, I had to re-design my Skull entirely.

After a week or so of designing on and off, my ninth revision resulted in my “final” design. With the help of my friend and fellow puzzler Rex Perez who created the design in DWG format, I was ready to have Skull fabricated. The plan was to use 5mm thick 304 stainless steel like the Dirty Dozen. Completed and assembled, the puzzle would measure about 55mm x 35mm x 30mm. I took the opportunity to try out two other metal cutting vendors instead of the one who did the cutting for my Dirty Dozen. Files were emailed and payments made. A week later I received 25 loose pieces from each of the vendors.

The 3-unit locking piece that goes right through and into the top of the skull

Skull with shaky bones

The first prototype from Vendor A was a dismal “failure”. The tolerance was so tight that the pieces could not fit at all. I could use a small file to sand down the pieces, but too much work. Wasted effort and money. The second Vendor B’s work is what you see here. All 25 pieces fit nicely, but with a bit too much free play between the pieces. A lot of shaking and rattling! Rex commented that the power output of the laser may have been too high. Thus “burning” away too much metal, making the notches and grooves bigger than intended. But at least when assembled, a semblance of a skull comes into play. You can recognize that the puzzle is a skull afterall. Another saving grace is that with the little 3-unit locking piece in place, none of the pieces will fall apart even when shaken hard.

As of this post, I have just finished design revision #14. A much improved design with re-shaping almost every piece. In fact its now been reduced to 24 pieces only. See the screen shot of the Burr Tools file shown here. In theory at least, the whole puzzle is better reinforced and supported and should not shake and rattle so much if the tolerances are improved. I will go for a second prototype. Have to explain to the fabricator how the pieces are supposed to work (they have no idea what the pieces are for!). Hope this one will turn out better.

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This rather unusual disentanglement puzzle came to me courtesy of Roxanne Miller during the IPP37 Puzzle Exchange.  For those who attended IPP last year and did an exchange with Roxanne, you will have realised that there is a certain sort of theme going on. Planned by Roxanne (and George Miller) of course. This theme runs through the outfits (or lack thereof) which Roxanne and George wore during the Exchange, right through to the puzzle itself and its packaging.  Rather devilish you might say!

Where’s the serpent?

The object of Adam & Eve is to “get the heads of Adam and Eve together”. At the starting position, Adam & Eve are joined somewhere around the lower limbs. The trick is to be able to navigate the two parts around and “along” each other to the final position as shown. It might have been relatively easy if the two circular metal rings and the red apple on the chain had not been present. The way the metal part have been bent and cut also causes some restrictions of movement.

I spent a while experimenting how the two figures interacted with each other, how to move Adam and Eve and so on. Not easy but later I figured out that I had to “dump” the apple to progress. It looks impossible to do so but like all good disentanglement puzzles, there is way of solving which is not obvious. Eventually with further trial and error, I got the two heads to lock together.

If I can solve this one without help, I would imagine that wire and disentanglement enthusiasts would not have a problem with this one. Its challenging no doubt but not frustratingly difficult at least IMHO. It will not get you into knots which you can’t extricate yourself, unlike some types of really complicated wire and rope puzzles. If that really happens, you can always dismantle the chain holding the apple. The Adam & Eve is one of those puzzles with just the right level of difficulty for an Exchange Puzzle. And did I mention that it was pretty fun to play with too? Nice design theme and concept, great to look at and a must-have for collectors.

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If you have seen or played with the famous “impossible object” puzzle called 4 Street Elbows, you will probably know who Saul is. Double Feature is also similar in concept to his IPP35 Exchange Puzzle called Restricted Area, another Coffin design.

The Double Feature is produced by Saul himself under the brand name Here To There Puzzles. Measuring 6.5cm x 6.2cm x 6cm, it’s a cuboid packing puzzle made out of two different woods. Construction fit and finish is decent. There is a top cover consisting of a sliding panel with slanted edges. Keeps the packed pieces in nicely.

not so “straight” forward

The goal of the puzzle is to pack six irregular pieces (five of which has 5 units each and the 6th with 2) into the box, under the lid. The box is also also affixed with two obstructions (once the sliding panel is removed). So it’s not just a matter of just trying to drop the pieces in but figuring how to navigate the pieces through the opening.

It is obvious given the obstructions that removal and assembly of the pieces would not be that easy. Especially more so for the latter. A good memory helps of course.  This is aided by the fact that the puzzle already came fully assembled. If you can figure out how to remove the pieces completely, the return to the box should not be much of a problem. But if not, forming a cube outside the box with the six pieces may help you to re-orientate. Burr Tools would not help here since the solve requires more than rectilinear moves. You probably figured out what this means! From my count, about 14-15 moves for complete disassembly.

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The Eiffel Six Cube was designed and manufactured by Alistair Morris of the UK. It also served as his first Exchange Puzzle at IPP37 in Paris last year. I had played with one of Ali’s earlier designs a while back, the very brilliant Bolt & Nut Puzzle, which stumped quite a few puzzlers too.

The object of the puzzle is to form a cube with each of the 6 faces bearing the image of the Eiffel Tower. Like most puzzlers that have played with this puzzle, the initial impression is that it would not be too difficult. But it remained unsolved for me for more than several days over the past week.

“EIFFEL FOR IT”

Yes, I did…I FELL FOR IT! This was the title that puzzler Lionel Depeux had suggested to Allard to use for his blog post. Why? Ali had cunningly designed the Eiffel Six Cube in a way that if you are not observant, you will “fall” for his trick. During my sessions with this puzzle, many a times I had come to the final stages of forming a cube but the last piece would always elude me. And this came to a point where I wondered if Ali had mistakenly printed the Eiffel images on the wrong places or mis-glued his cubes which resulted in the wrong shape of a piece. The correct solution just seemed impossible to achieve.

I decided to ask Allard for a clue and so shot him a message. After a couple of cryptic responses which I didn’t find of much help, his last reply to me before I went to bed (yes, Singapore is about 7 hours ahead of the UK) was to examine the puzzle carefully.  The next morning I took out the Eiffel Cube again and this time I played with it more slowly than I did before, taking my time and looking at how each piece interacted with the rest. Suddenly it hit me….and I found the solution! I first reaction…WTF!  At last I got to build a cube with the Eiffel Tower on each of the six faces. What an incredible A-ha moment! Totally brilliant design and  a real surprise ending!

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I think a wooden puzzle coming from Wil Strijbos would be usually somewhat of a surprise. Most puzzlers know Wil Strijbos as a designer of challenging, high quality (and some rather expensive) puzzles made of metal!  Well, don’t let the title of this post fool you. This wooden puzzle from Wil was actually his Exchange Puzzle during IPP37 in Paris last August. And this wooden puzzle was designed by someone else. This is not to say that Wil has never designed wooden ones. He has many years ago, and one of them called Just Fit (The Cut) also happen to win  the 1990 Hikimi Puzzle Competition for wooden puzzle designs.

Back to the puzzle. This interlocking burr goes by the  name of Framed Sticks 4U and is designed by a Mr Gong. Now I have never met Mr Gong, but I understand he is a close friend of Wil and resides in China. Mr Gong has designed a number of wooden burr puzzles (made out of bamboo) which have been sold by Wil in the past several years through Wil’s distribution email list.

design & construction

The FS4U is a 6 x 6 x 5 solid. It is an interlocking framed burr consisting of a square frame and 4 typical burr pieces (sticks) with the usual type of notches. Nothing overly unusual. The frame (box) spots a couple of obstructions glued to the insides which restrict the movements of the pieces and thus brings the level of difficulty of the puzzle to a Level 24 solution. This means that it takes 24 moves to remove the first piece. And a total of 30 moves to disassemble the entire puzzle.  I checked Mr Gong’s design against other 6 x 6 x 5 size puzzles on PWPB and I didn’t find any which were similar in design or number of pieces. Only one other design had a similar shape. So Mr Gong’s design appears to be very different from the rest.

The FS4U is made of two different woods but as to the exact species I don’t know. The burr sticks consist of two pairs with dark and light colours to give the puzzle some colour contrast. Construction and fit is good. Although the copy here is not the kind of very impeccable standard that one would get from the usual few North American or European puzzle craftsmen.  Everything worked properly and the sticks slid smoothly. No issues. The puzzle is produced under Wil’s Streetwise Inc brand, the same company that manufactures all of Wil’s metal puzzles. Size wise, it is about 7.5cm x 7.5cm x 6cm and surprisingly quite heavy in the hand, so the woods used  must probably be some exotic wood.

The puzzle has a shiny finishing to the external surface, as if coated with some form of vanish covering, which seems rather unusual since.  Most wooden puzzles would have some form of (tung) oil rubbed into the wood to smoothen,  nourish and preserve the wood But this is my first wooden puzzle I have with such a smooth and shiny surface.

SOLVING & PLAY

At Level 24.2.2.2, the FS4U is not easy. The disassembly took me a while to get the hang off, given there are some dead ends during the solve at the beginning. But because you can see the movement of the sticks from both the top and bottom openings of the frame, it is not as difficult as other similarly high level burrs. At some point I was able to figure out the moves to remove the first piece. Once that came out, the rest just popped out of the frame. Re-assembly was a different thing altogether! Despite my best efforts to remember the moves (and even photographing the process, because I know burrs like these are quite beyond me), I still had to resort to the provided solution sheet. Thankfully I was also further aided by Burr Tools, which helped me get all the pieces back to their proper places.

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The Coffin’s Four Piece Cube is very well made out of white oak and finished with an oil finish to give it a smooth touch and allows the pieces to slide smoothly but remain snug in the solved position. Dimensionally it measures about 6.8cm cube all round. Pretty hefty in the hands. The puzzle comes packed in its own box and even wrapped with orange wrinkled paper. What’s unusual about the puzzle is also that the packaging comes with accompanying notes to the puzzle; which describes the puzzle and gives various references to other publications. A good read for those interested to find out more.

The object of the puzzle is of course to take it apart and put it together again.  This is an interlocking cube after all, and the pieces fit so very well that I took a wee bit of time to find the first piece that moves. After that, it was a matter of tugging at the remaining pieces for them to come apart. Putting it back was not so easy if you scramble the pieces and happen to forget the orientation and positioning of each piece.

The other puzzles I have exchanged with Norton include his Octassembly and Packed Pyramid. Both of which are quite different in design from Coffin’s Four Piece Cube. Norton is a retired maths and computer science professor from Amherst College.

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During IPP37, we exchanged puzzles and his puzzle to me was Deadly Romance, a pretty cool and intriguing name I might add. Deadly Romance was Markus’ own design and the production duties went to Pelikan Puzzles of the Czech Republic.  Quality of construction and finish is very good up to the usual Pelikan standards. The puzzle is an interlocking cage burr…but with a twist. The goal is to “put the two pieces into the cage with the colours of the pieces and the cage matching…”. Both the cage and the pieces are made of a combo of maple and wenge to provide the dark and light colours. The puzzle comes assembled and you need to remove the pieces from the cage and replace the same pieces according to the instructions. To remove was not too difficult since there are only two pieces. However, to fit them back into the cage AND match the colours at the same time…a much more daunting task, which I failed miserably. It was only with the help of Burr Tools that I discovered the way the pieces were supposed to go in and the type of moves required. And it (with hindsight) wasn’t so that difficult it would appear, if only I had kept at it and not give up. Well, whoever said I was with good with burrs anyway? which I am not.

Markus Gotz has a number of puzzle designs to his name and I have a couple of his exchange puzzles that I have yet to play with. He is also responsible for the very unique looking packing puzzle Framework II.

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Needless to say, with the PPWKP, Keith had a couple of new tricks up his sleeve which wasn’t too obvious to me while I played with it. The PPWKP is made from Maple and has a Walnut packing strips screwed to the sides to prevent the puzzle from coming apart accidentally. It even comes with its own numbering.

Although not shown in the photo, Keith did provide a small screw driver for removing the screws in the Walnut strips. The PPWKP measures about 90mm x 90mm x 22mm. Quality and construction is very good and I might add, necessary for a puzzle of this nature, where accuracy of the cuts and fit is paramount. Accompanying the puzzle is a sheet of instructions and some history of the Wedge Key Puzzles.

The object of course is to take apart the 4 jigsaw looking pieces and trick or mechanism for the PPWKP differs from the IPP35 version.  This is a sequential discovery puzzle where you utilise whatever “tools” and parts that come with the puzzle to solve it.  No other external tools are allowed. As mentioned, removal of the walnut strips is necessary so the puzzling begins from that point onwards. The provided screw driver however does not count and honestly wouldn’t help unless you wanted to use it to pry the pieces apart by force.

I would consider this latest design of Keith’s to be rather tricky. It isn’t too difficult once you discover how the mechanism of the puzzle works but finding out the mechanism to it is the fun part. Surprisingly, it took me longer than I had expected to solve; I wasn’t paying enough attention

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Now back to the puzzle; the Eye Fill Burr is shaped oval like an eye and the instructions come as followings: “Swap out one piece of the iris and fill the eye with the pupil”. The entire puzzle is 3D printed as Steve usually does with his Exchange and other puzzles, such as his Vapors,  Helical Burr and  Pole Dancers. It is  around 11.5cm x 5.5cm x 4.5cm in size.  As you can see from the photos, the puzzle comes assembled with three pieces of the blue iris and separately there is another iris-piece and the pupil. When I first took out the puzzle, I thought that the separate blue piece was a spare, just in case someone broke one of the other pieces during play. But I realised during play that actually the 4th piece was to substitute one of the three inside the eye. And you need to add the black pupil piece in as well.

Well, what resembles a free-form looking puzzle is really an interlocking burr using the triangular format on the inside, with the frame and pieces shaped appropriately to resemble an eye. While only three pieces in the frame during the start position, removal is not a simple as it seems. I did have to manipulate the pieces around a bit to figure out how best to remove one of the three identical pieces. Rotations appear to be necessary but once you have figured out the orientation of the pieces relative to the frame, removal of the pieces is not as difficult as one would imagine, but nonetheless the execution can be rather tricky. It did take me a while to get it right. Now for the re-assembly with the pupil, it is harder since now four (instead of three) pieces need to be inside the frame. Again, some thinking through how the pieces should go and it becomes fairly manageable. I am not sure about this but I think a slight bit of force may be necessary to insert the black pupil since the puzzle is 3D printed and the tolerances are not as tight and precise as wooden burrs finely cut and crafted in a jig.  I hope I wasn’t doing it wrong tho’. All in, I think Steve came up with a great (and unique) concept for the design and nicely executed.

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Like the Straight Up two years ago, French Point’s objective is for the puzzler to open and close the blade. But David has upped his ante a notch. What is quite different now for the French Point is that the “blade” this time is actually made of metal, not plastic as in the Straight Up. Three layers of thin aluminium (I think) sheets joined together form the entire length of the blade. The handle while plastic, retains that lacquer covered shiny look. The blade has some curved cut-outs which looks (very) precision cut;  by CNC cutter maybe? Could David have used a real  razor blade for his puzzle? Well, maybe since there is machine cutting anyway, but it might have been too dangerous for play! All in, very nicely executed and the quality and finish is very high; even the box it comes in looks expensive.

The French Point comes unsolved, so the blade is locked into the handle. Without going into too much detail about how the mechanism works, which surely will be a spoiler for sure, a series of tilt and flip motions are necessary to unfold the blade. One can hear some rattling noise inside and you know for certain that there is something restraining the blade. It didn’t take me too long to feel my way to the solution-since nothing is visible on the outside and obviously trial and error here and there is required to solve this puzzle. But I had a bit of trouble and it took me a tad longer to fold the thing back together, even tho’, ironically, I can now see the “hidden” locking mechanism and how the trick works. I reckon there is an efficient and correct way to get the blade open in a jiffy and I thought I had nailed it. But still it eludes me now and again.

If you are interested to get a copy, its available from David’s website at US$70/-.

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The Cast Ring is one of the older Cast Puzzles around having been released 17 years ago in the year 2000. Not only is it one of the older puzzles (the first Cast Puzzle, the Cast Star came out in 1983!), it is also a fairly large sized puzzle and hefty, compared to some of the other Cast Puzzles around today. Measuring about 58mm x 53mm  x 30mm, the Ring is made from zinc alloy and finished with a two-tone polished gold and chrome surface for the four pieces.  My copy comes from the early versions of the puzzle and thus has that shiny look. The packaging is also the old style transparent window black box with gold text.

Today’s Cast Ring, while still retaining the silver and gold look, has a matt finish. Personally I feel the older version which has a polished surface all round looks better than the current matt copies today.  And the Ring looks like a real (giant) decorative ring which will probably fit the small wrist of an adult or a child. In terms of aesthetics, I think the Cast Ring is also probably one of the best looking Cast Puzzles around!

There is no information who is the designer of the Ring is, but it seems that the design came under the “supervision” of Nob Yoshigahara, the famous Japanese puzzle collector and designer. Today the annual IPP Puzzle Design Competition is named after him in his honour.

The Ring consists of 4 pieces which are looped against each other inside and cannot be separated. The puzzle does not “interlock” in the usual sense. Hence, the moment you take it out of the packaging, you can quite easily dismantle the puzzle and it comes apart (sometimes without warning) and automatically becomes unscrambled.

The Ring is rated 4 out of 6 stars for difficulty, meaning that it is above average difficulty. Hanayama Cast Puzzles are for me a bit of a 50-50 thing…meaning that I can usually solve them about 50% of the time. The Ring is one of those in the -ve 50%. When I took it out of the box, it didn’t look that difficult with the pieces all stacked together. But the moment I disengaged the Ring, I knew I would have a hard time re-assembling…and boy I did! Luckily Hanayama has a more mainstream and mass appeal and a lot of casual puzzlers (and non-puzzlers) buy Cast Puzzles for their affordability as well as their overall good quality and playability. Hence there are usually more than several videos from zealous folks on YouTube showing the solution to probably every Hanayama Cast Puzzle on the market today.

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The TIF was the exchange puzzle of Bernhard Schweitzer of Germany at IPP37 in Paris this past August. Bernhard makes his own puzzles and runs a puzzle site called www.puzzlewood.de.  While his site is in German, you can easily do a Google translate to read it in English. Anyway the nice pictures of the many puzzles in the site gallery speak for themselves.

TIF basically comprises a cube-shaped cage that locks two odd-shaped pieces inside. Each of the two pieces consists of 8 units. Apart from this Type B here, there are also Types A and C. For A and C, there are also just two pieces each 8 units, and identical cages but the pieces for each puzzle are differently shaped. Not sure what made Bernhard choose Type B over the other two since all three solutions of A, B and C are the same level of difficulty. Although the TIF has only two removable pieces, nonetheless it still has a level 8.2 solution, meaning that it takes minimum 8 moves to remove the first piece and 2 moves to remove the second. Nothing to be scoffed at here!

The exchange copy came in Smoked Cherry for the cage and Maple for the pieces. Construction fit and finish is decent and the pieces slide smoothly but snugly. My copy became stuck after I got back to Singapore from IPP due to the high humidity but within a day or two in the dryer, everything worked as intended. Maple expands rather quickly when there is high humidity and the day after I solved the puzzle, the pieces felt unusually tight again. Dimensionally the TIF measures about 70mm all round.

TIF is one of those burr puzzles that I generally enjoy and can manage without any aid; mainly because they are lower level burrs that are more suited for a non-burrist like myself. This is one of those puzzles that I could take the pieces apart AND scramble them and not forget how to put them back together. No Burr Tools needed-ha! Of course the fact that the TIF has only two pieces helps a lot in the remembering of the orientation of the pieces during assembly. For an experienced puzzler and even a non-burr enthusiast, not at all that difficult, although the re-assembly may be a tad more challenging, which is usually the case in burr puzzles.

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