A Plethora of torture from Alexander
I will say it up front – Alexander Magyarics is one of the best puzzle designers
out there. I don’t say it because I consider him a friend, I say it because he
has proven it time and time again! You all know it from the rather large number
of his designs that have been created by Jakub and Jaroslav’s Pelikan puzzles
team that have made it into all of our collections. Quite a few of his puzzles
have made it into my
top ten puzzles
of the year and they include 3D packing puzzles with incredible shapes
(sometimes requiring rotations and sometimes just rectilinear moves), there are
now even a few burrs under his belt which are not just a creation made using the
Burrtoools software aimed at getting the highest level possible – the important
thing about Alex’s creations are that they are interesting and require the
dreaded thought© to be solved. This requires something very special or very
warped in the head – I leave it up to you to decide.
For the last couple of Xmases Alex has made me a lovely and not so little care
package of puzzles he has both designed and 3D printed himself (Sigh! I wish I
was allowed a 3D printer but if I wish to keep all parts of my anatomy
attached then that is not going to happen). I received 14 of them this time
and Mrs S was less than impressed (one thing about 3D printed puzzles is that
they do look like child’s toys and are not attractive i.e. no “wife appeal”).
I reassured “she who frightens police officers to death” that they would be
kept out of sight and not left on display anywhere and put them in my study in
yet another box of puzzles to be solved – my goodness, I have a huge backlog
just now!
This last 10 days “she who makes the sun hide in fear” was up in Sconny
Botland visiting the outlaws and I was free to leave stuff lying around and
play with them at my leisure. I actually did not have much time to myself due
to work but the advantage of tray puzzles is that they take up very little
space and can be carried around easily. I had some other toys in transit from
various parts of the world and until they arrived had nothing that “had” to be
solved fast. Time to play with the packing puzzles.
Rhinnocent
Alex had suggested that I start with this one (I had asked in desperation at
preserving my ego for the easier ones). Place 5 of them in the smaller tray and
then all 7 in the larger one. Usually I am truly awful at this type of thing and
find that all I do is trial and error over and over again because after a while
I cannot remember what I have tried before. I started in exactly the same way
but within a minute or so, I was able to see some vague logic to them and was
able to direct my approach. Wow! I had the small tray done in about 5 minutes
and then the larger one in a further 15 or so. Amazing – a feeling of
achievement and think©ing had occurred!
1 Billion
This was the second one he told me to do and I really wasn’t sure about it. It
is very attractive and quite clearly had been designed using Burrtools – how
else could he know that there was ONLY one solution? I found initially that I
began to place pieces randomly and quickly found myself blocked but there must
have been a reason for suggesting this as an early challenge. Alex had asked me
why I thought it was called 1 Billion? I suspected because that might be how
many years it might take me and hopefully asked whether it was because there was
actually 1 billion ways to solve it. I still don’t know why the name! Having
failed a couple of times, I realised that there are some very complex shapes for
some of the pieces and they are very limited in where they can go. Why not start
with them? Then move to progressively less complex shapes. After a couple of
blind ends in the solve, I had it. Yet again, a tray packing puzzle that
required thought© and very little random placement. This is sheer genius design!
Pieces of my Heart
I couldn’t resist this one as my next challenge – it looked relatively
straightforward – the aim being to create a full heart with it placed in the top
left corner. This is Alex’s first sliding tile puzzle. I usually find these
unrewarding due to the large number of random moves to try and an enormous
decision tree that eventually gets created. This apparently can be solved with
45 moves (I did not manage to do it that quickly). Having had such a great time
with the previous puzzles I felt that there must be something special about this
one too and I was not wrong. Unusually for one of these, the first bunch of
moves are very constrained and there is only one path for quite a while. After
that, I reached a decision point and took the wrong turn (as usual) but was not
led up a huge long dead end with lots of other paths to rule out on the way. The
blind ends are relatively short and sweet, requiring a backtrack and searching
elsewhere. My memory is awful and this puzzle never required me to commit huge
long sequences to memory. I found hot quite rewarding to finally reach the end
point – I suspect that about 150-200 moves was used in the end after false paths
and backtracking. I may even try it again to see if I can do it in a shorter
sequence. Don’t look if you don’t want to see the end positions.
Possible in 45 moves? Not by me!
Show/Hide
Finally, I couldn’t resist one of Alex’s multiple challenge puzzles. The fun
thing about a huge number of his packing puzzles from last year as well as
this year (and even some of the Pelikan puzzles like Sliders) have multiple
challenges to them. I decided to strat with the rather beautiful ICEbreaker:
The pieces look simple (3 copies of the word ICE) and the first challenge had
256 solutions. Now, that is my type of puzzle – even I can solve it
(hopefully). Again, this has been created with the aim to make you think© and
it worked! My first trial and error attempts failed and I had to look at how
the letters interacted with each other. This made it much easier and I quickly
found one of those 256. I have not searched for lots more as I won’t be able
to remember what I have done before. The next challenge with the constraint of
having alike letters touching was much more difficult but still a pleasurable
experience. Challenge 3 nearly had me giving up – fill the tray leaving gaps
in two diagonally opposite corners. I tried to be clever and look at the best
way to pack tightly and leave a voxel free in those corners. Well, me being
clever usually ends in disaster and I was not disappointed. I spent a good 45
minutes trying the same thing over and over again and it would not work. I
then tried something else that was much less clever and this ended in the
solved puzzle. I retrospectively entered the pieces into Burrtools to look at
the solution set for this challenge and was interested to see that the
tightest interaction that could leave a corner empty is not one of the
solutions – have I said that this man is a genius? He perfectly led me astray
and made me waste my time on something impossible! Challenge 4 was going to be
impossible for me and I decided to try for the anti slide challenge. Take 2
sets of ICE and put them in the tray in such a way that none of the pieces can
slide.
I have only played with a few anti slide puzzles before and have found that I
just do not have the skill set to solve them. Many people at IPPs have loved
them and a few have been entered into the design competition. I have played
and failed before. But Alex has challenged me and I had to at least try. The
problem here is that the pieces are all quite open and the tray quite big when
you are only using 2 sets of pieces. I was very surprised at how much fun this
was. I initially had pieces freely sliding in an ocean of space and then
worked to get them tangled. Progress is very much stepwise as I found that
changing positions of some pieces sort of locked bits up but not enough to
prevent them all from sliding. I gradually worked my way through moving more
and more pieces until there was a big Aha! moment. I had solved my first anti
slide puzzle and it was good! I doubt that this will become a favourite genre
but it’s definitely worth a try and a big bonus as an additional challenge in
a tray packing puzzle.
I still have a whole bunch of these to try and a few will always be in my work
bag to be taken out during a quiet time. Thank you Alex for a wonderful gift
and restoring my faith in my abilities!
Brass Monkey Sixential Discovery Puzzle (BM6)
Yes, it has arrived and the preorders close today. If you want the chance of a slightly early arrival and free shipping then get to the Two Brass Monkey site quickly and place your order. Allard loved his experience of solving the prototype. I have spent a several hours on mine and have not even found the first step (sigh, I am not very bright!) There is a lot of interesting stuff to be seen and it is going to be a huge challenge.
If you wait then it goes on sale formally on February 4th.