Naoaki Takashima designed this sliding block puzzle way in March 1985. From what I have heard, Takashima-san owns the largest collection of mechanical puzzles in Japan. The collection it seems is well in  excess of 10,000 puzzles. IPP37 was Takashima-san’s 30th IPP party todate! So far I have played with one other of Takashima-san’s puzzles and that was his IPP36 Exchange Puzzle called Seal, another sliding bock puzzle. The Puzzle 9 was first given out by Takashima-san at IPP9 in Tokyo in 1988.  Back then very few copies were distributed as there was no puzzle exchange as what we have in today’s IPP gatherings. Last year in Paris, Takashima-san decided to use his Puzzle 9 as his Exchange Puzzle.

classification

Sliding block puzzle. For more information on sliding block puzzles generally, you may want to take a look at Edward Hordern’s 1987 book called Sliding Piece Puzzles available from Amazon. Takashima-san’s Puzzle 9 design was featured in Hordern’s book and numbered as “B25”.

MANUFACTURE

Produced by a company called ASOBIDEA in Japan. There is not a lot of information about this company. They do sell a small range of products including some folding puzzles. The assembly of the puzzle was done by Takashima-san.

The Puzzle 9 is made from laser cut acrylic and quality is outstanding in my opinion. The puzzle measures 14cm x 8cm x 0.4cm. The pieces which resemble playing cards have their design etched on, no stickers used here. Very good detailing indeed. Having produced acrylic puzzles myself in the past, such detail and quality would not have come cheap at all.

solving

The object of the puzzle is to position the pieces in the START position and move rearrange the pieces to arrive at the END position. The Puzzle 9 is similar in some sense to the very well known 15 Puzzle which has a pretty long history. Aside from rearranging the pieces to the desired format, the Puzzle 9 also requires the solution to show the uncovered #9 at the top of the tray, an additional challenge.

The Puzzle 9’s solution eluded me for quite a few days. Even just getting the correct order of the cards right I had problems. When I finally took a look at the provided solution, I realised why I was not able to solve it. I can’t say more here without giving away anything. It has a nice rather unexpected solution which awaits the successful solver.

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The Security Lock is manufactured by German based board games and puzzle maker Siebenstein-Spiele. It measures about 13.5cm tall (including the shackle), 11.5cm wide and 1.7cm thick. It comprises three layers of laser cut wood sandwiching a single acrylic layer all screwed together. The overall quality of construction and fit is very good. All the pieces move and slide smoothly. The Security Lock also comes with a laser cut wooden key.

A puzzle lock?

While the Security Lock is shaped like a lock with shackle and all, it is essentially a sliding block puzzle. This seems to be recent new trend in design. This lock is similar to two other wooden locks in my collection, using a sliding block concept. The “n-ary” locks  and their variants are still around and will remain so, as designers come up with new ones.

The body of the lock acts like a tray holding eight square and rectangle pieces. The layer of acrylic functions as a cover (with some cut-outs) to prevent the sliding pieces from being removed (in order to cheat). The blocks restrain the shackle in its place. The goal is to slide the pieces in such a way that the shackle can slide upwards and be freed.

The key has is useful too. Obviously it does not function like a real lock key does, but it helps to prod and move the blocks around inside the constrained space. The acrylic cut-outs are too small for most adult fingers to shift the blocks.

Solving

The blocks can only move up down left and right. In the starting position, two blocks are obstructing the shackle. The shackle needs to slide upwards to the opened position. So obviously these two must move out of the way for the shackle to slide free. Hence the movement of the rest of the blocks in a certain way to achieve this. I cannot remember how many moves it takes to solve this “puzzle lock” but I would rate this puzzle as much more than a moderately difficult puzzle. Although not frustratingly so. I hit dead ends several times before I figured out the sequence of the moves.

Getting the shackle back to the starting position is a matter of reversing the steps, but similar problems persisted and I had to again try several times before everything went back to their original state. Puzzlemaster of Canada rates it as level 8 – demanding, but I think their assessment is a bit on the high side. I would rate it more a level 6.5.

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