Symmetric Shape Puzzles

admin — Sat, 09 Jun 2018 15:33:06 +0000

The IPP37 Puzzle Exchange saw no less than half a dozen or so symmetric shape puzzles. These and other similar style ones have become increasingly popular for puzzlers and designers in recent years. Especially so after Symmetrick, an innocuous looking two piece puzzle by Vesa Timonen got a Top 10 Vote Getter during the IPP33 Puzzle Design Competition.

The three symmetric shape puzzles I played with over this weekend came to me courtesy of Tomas Linden, Nick Baxter and Emrehan Halici. They are the Spir Ala Rips (above photo), French Revolution and 3 Pieces 9 Symmetric Shapes respectively. All three were exchange puzzles from the three gents during IPP37 in Paris last year.

SPIR ALA Rips

Not sure what the name means but Vesa Timonen seems to have done it again. Again just two pieces but this time with one hole in each piece. The goal is to place the pieces flat on a table such that the resulting shape can be bisected into two identical shapes. I absolutely had no luck with this one but did however enjoy the nice strong woody scent emanating from the Curly Birch used to produce this puzzle.

French Revolution

French colours adorned here of course. Consisting of four pieces, one blue and three red, the goal is to form three possible symmetrical shapes using a combination of the blue piece and any two of the three red pieces. As of this post, I only managed to find one of the three possible solutions. Like the name suggest, I kept going round in circles to no avail. The other two shapes have eluded me thus far.

3 Pieces 9 symmetric shapes

A straight forward self-explanatory name for the puzzle but this one is anything by straight forward. And the puzzle consist of only three pieces. The goal is to form 9 symmetric shapes but after two days of play, I managed only to form 3 shapes…a rather dismal result percentage if I may add.

SYM-353

Now this one is from me, yes! SYM-353 was my exchange puzzle at IPP37. Why the “353”? Well, it consist of three pieces; two with 3 sides and one with 5 sides. Sym 353 was a design collaboration between Stanislav Knot of the Czech Republic and me. My original design had just one solution (as I intended). But Stan saw my design and thought the three pieces could form another symmetrical shape. With some adjustments to the shapes, this proved to be true. Little did we realise that there were two more possible solutions when I sent the puzzle to Ken Johnson of Canada and Rex Perez of Philippines for testing. Each of them came up with a new and different solution, resulting in a total of 4 possible solutions.

Diagram and proportion measurements courtesy of Stanislav Knot, Czech Republic

The post Symmetric Shape Puzzles appeared first on JL Puzzles.

Hanayama Cast Dial

admin — Sun, 05 Nov 2017 08:24:35 +0000

The Cast Dial is the work of Vesa Timonen of Finland, who has todate designed a large number of Cast puzzles for Hanayama as well as other non-Cast puzzles. A really nice soft-spoken gentleman whom I have had the pleasure of meeting at the past several IPPs. The Dial was released about a year back in November 2016. My copy was purchased from Allen Stein of Puzzlemaster, Canada during the IPP37 Puzzle Party in Paris this past August.

Dimensionally the Dial measures along each side at about 55mm. Like most Hanayama puzzles, this one is made of cast zinc alloy. Quality of the Dial is very good and despite there being moving parts, I didn’t feel any “looseness” and the puzzle feels heavy and solid in the palm.

The dark triangular portion houses two light coloured “dials” that are pressed flat against each other. The objective of the Dial is to remove the two dials from the triangular “cage”, which itself can be separated into two parts. So disassembled, there are altogether 4 parts. The dials can rotate on all axes within their housing and you can turn each dial in a counter direction against the other.

This is a level 4 (or 4 stars) difficulty puzzle meaning that it is “Fairly Hard”, with level 5 being “Hard” and level 6 “Very Hard”. Like many Hanayama Cast puzzles where it is not obvious what needs to be done (because the mechanism is hidden), I started with gentle manipulation of the dials and trying to turn them and also tugging at the two pieces that form the triangular cage. The packaging itself also has some cryptic clues “Turn the dials on the front and back, both sides and proceed. It is important not only to go forward, but also to step down one step at a time”…and I duly followed these instructions. And pretty good clues they were too, provided you have a good sense of feel for the pieces.

Without adding any spoilers here for those who have not solved the puzzle, the dials interact with each other and need to be turned in such a way that will enable a release of the dials themselves and the cage. I took approximately ten minutes or so before the various parts started to separate. I had a pretty good idea of the mechanism holding the parts together…and hence was able to turn both dials and cage to the point where they separated nicely. No force needed whatsoever. Putting everything back together should have been simply the reverse but I had more trouble doing this than taking the Dial apart. And it took me a tad longer before I secure all the parts back to their original positions. The difficulty rating is about right here IMHO; challenging but not frustratingly so. Once you see the progress you are making, persistence will probably take you through the end. Then comes the harder part…reassembly!