Discoveries on a puzzling cruise

While we were cruising across to Copenhagen, Gill asked if there were any puzzle shops in Copenhagen, and once I'd got over the initial shock (only kidding dear!) I hit Google and discovered a place called Games that looked like it might have some interesting looking puzzles in it...

Once we'd found our way into the city centre and done some of the touristy sight-seeing stuff, we wandered down the main shopping drag and came across Jorck's Passage and duly found Games ... which it turns out has a pretty decent array of great puzzles. In one display there was a set of Sonic Warp (or whatever they call themselves at the moment!) puzzles including Isis, Ramisis and Coppernisis.  There were several displays of cast puzzles of varying descriptions, entanglement puzzles by the dozen and shelves full of Thinkfun puzzles and games.

 

Around the back of the shop I found a veritable treasure trove of wooden puzzles in large glass display cabinet ... I recognised tons of Vinco's along the top two shelves and saw quite a few puzzles that I didn't recognise... including an interesting cube dissection where the pieces also fit into a rectangular box that I  immediately decided I needed to add to the collection... it'll turn up in a blog post one of these days, promise!

I also picked up a travel-sized Katamino puzzle that has already provided more than its fair share of puzzling trying to fit various combinations of pentominoes into different sized rectangles in the playing area.

We didn't try and find any puzzle shops in Stockholm but while we were wandering around Gamla Stan we had a look in a little shop that was run by a group of craftsmen who took turns in manning the shop that sells their handiwork. One of the craftsmen is a woodworker called Carl Nelson who happened to produce one or two puzzles, so I picked up a copy of his 11-piece furniture puzzle - simple and cute!

Before getting into Helsinki I hit up Google for some puzzle shops and I found one interesting candidate called Heureka in the shopping mall at the Kamppi station. Thanks to Gill's superior map-reading skills we managed to find it and I was amazed to see not only a full display stand of Cast Puzzles but shelves full of JC Constantin puzzles ... including several that I didn't already have, so I helped myself to a copy of Blumen Orange and Surface along with an intricate-looking double sided ball bearing maze whose name escapes me...

On the wall next to the cashier there were rows and rows of puzzles that looked like Tomas Linden's work and indeed on examining the packaging they were all Tomas' work branded for Heureka - so I picked up a copy of his Comet disentanglement puzzle... Oh and a set of optical illusion cards that were going for a song...

A few days later in Tallinn's old town I discovered a cute little puzzle box along a well-known principle - not a difficult puzzle - not even particularly good-looking, but it'll remind me of my visit to Tallinn ...

Having left on a cruise with the intention of just having a holiday, somehow some new puzzles managed to hunt me down and sneak into the collection ... now that's a great holiday!

(Another) Puzzling Cruise

Gill and I went on a fantastic Baltic Cruise for our main summer holiday this year... we sailed from Harwich and despite concerns about the treacherous North Sea crossing, virtually all of our sailing was wonderfully smooth.

Certain that I wouldn't be able to last almost two whole weeks without some puzzles, I made sure that I took some toys along to keep me amused between all the eating, sight-seeing, shows, eating, movies and of course eating. 

Keen to make sure that I could get the maximum amount of puzzling out of the minimum amount of space (even though we didn't have to fly to meet our cruise and effectively had no luggage restrictions at all!) I took along some multiple challenge-type puzzles and one that I thought would be really hard...

First up I took along three sets of Tantrix Match puzzles that I'd bought from Tomas at Sloyd.

Before I left I'd noticed that the three sets all used the same pieces and boards, so I took along a single board and pieces and three sets of challenges ( Basic, Family and Expert). [The other Tantrix Match set I wrote about previously uses the same pieces as well... FWIW.] 

Each of the sets of challenges has a variety of difficulty levels among their twelve puzzles, with the Basic set having predominantly easier puzzles, the Expert having predominantly harder puzzles and the Family set having a nice balance between the two extremes.

I worked my way through all of the challenges starting with the Basic set up through to the hardest ones in the Expert pack. It was great having a puzzle handy that I could dip into every now and then and spend as little or as long as I had without feeling like you'd lose a train of thought (or a set of positions you'd already tried) - although some of the later problems definitely needed a more systematic approach every now and then...

As you'd expect the easier problems can generally be dispatched in a matter of minutes (some literally only have a couple of permutations for the first few pieces) whereas some of the later problems ended up taking me several ten or fifteen minute sessions to find the solution. Great puzzle to dip in and out of and plenty of puzzling for relatively little bulk - i.e. a good travelling puzzle!

The second puzzle I took along to work on was Ton Delsing's Cat and Dog Sliding puzzle... while this one may look pretty benign, it has a few little quirks that Ton helpfully described when I met him at Wil's place a few weeks earlier. First of all the central column can only be entered from the top or bottom row (you can't slide inwards from the side positions) and one of the blank pieces in the central column is limited to only being able to move between the two middle blocks of the centre column ... which gives you an outer ring for circulating the pieces and the ability to swap a piece into the centre where it won't circulate.

The starting position has "CAT and Dog" across the top and then the words "DOG" and "CAT" running down, so all you have to do is swap either the sets of letters of the individual words around to get them properly lined up...

Before I left on the cruise I'd begun idly playing around with it and had managed to massively scramble it ... so I thought it would make a good puzzle to take along on the cruise... unfortunately it was too good a puzzle to take on the cruise and in spite of several sessions of trying to get the hang of it, it has come home just as scrambled as it was when I left on holiday ... so Ton wins, for now...

By the way, it's cleverly designed, right down to the locking piece to keep things where you left them...

The third puzzle I took along for the ride was a copy of Ivan's Hinge that I'd picked up from Amazon. Ivan's Hinge is a loop of triangular plastic pieces with hinges between each adjoining triangle that will enable every joint to be folded either way. Each triangle has a combination of red, orange or blue colouring. There's a deck of cards with a challenge printed on each side of the cards and your goal is to fold the loop so that you get the shape indicated on the card with the colouring matching that on the card...

Things start out pretty simply with having to make a red square against a blue background ... and if you've done it properly, turning it over will match the next challenge: an orange square against a blue background.

As you work your way through the challenges, not only does the colouring get a bit more challenging, but the shapes start to get a little more unusual as well ...a good fun couple of hours puzzling in between all the eating, and some other stuff on the cruise.

 

n-ary therapy

I reckon these two puzzles are probably the closest to puzzling therapy you can find...

I picked up a copy of Thinkfun’s Spin Out via Amazon recently because I reckoned that every puzzle collection needs a copy... based on the Gray code principle, each of the seven dials needs to be in a horizontal position in order to allow the central slider to move out – but since each of the dials interferes with its neighbours you need to follow a series of moves to successively unlock each dial ... except that you’ll find that you need to keep going backwards and forwards ... and in the end it takes 85 moves to get the central slider out... 

 

Helpfully this version of Spin Out has a short-cut back to the beginning in the form of an opening on the side that lets you insert the central slider in the locked position...neat! 

...by the way, if you’re interested – Spin Out was invented by William Keister while working at Bell Labs where a colleague, Frank Gray, had invented a technique for error correction in electronic communications ... which subsequently became known as the Gray Code ... see the link there... :-)

[Jaap Scherphuis’ wonderfully useful website has some great analysis of Spin Out –  - including a recursive formula for working out how many moves are required for this sort of puzzle – L(n) = L(n-1) + 2*L(n-2) + 1, starting with L(1)=1 and L(2)=2 ... which all collapses down to L(n) = INT [2^(n+1) / 3].   ]

 

The second bit of n-ary therapy comes in the form of Crazy Elephant Dance by Markus Götz. I got this one from Peter Knoppers when I met up with him at Wil’s – Peter sells them as laser-cut wooden kits for a jolly decent price and I spent a couple of hours putting it all together. The bits all go together quite easily and the kits have been designed to ensure that the critical alignment is all taken care of with the help of a bunch of cocktail sticks – clever...

 

Once it was all together, the first order of business was actually locking the puzzle up – you build the frame and the slider separately and then have to progressively lock the puzzle up. The dials on this puzzle take the shape of cute elephants and the twist here is that whereas Spin Out was binary-based with each dial having two interesting positions (vertical or horizontal), this one has three interesting positions (up, right and down) – a ternary Gray code. With only 5 dials / elephants to contend with, the requirements of the ternary design still provides a reasonably lengthy solution path to free the central slider.

 

The elephants all start with their trunks in the air and there’s a single turning circle where elephants can be rotated, their neighbours permitting. Once you have all the trunks pointing downwards, the slider will be free.

This one’s not only a fun puzzle to build yourself, but the rhythm of running backwards and forwards through the solution path is definitely therapeutic! 

...and I don’t that I’m the only one who thinks that as it won an honourable mention at the 2005 Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition.

Puzzlers being generous, again...

[Today’s blog post comes from a very hot St Petersburg...]

It feels like ages ago since I visited Wil Strijbos for his last-in-a-while-Queens Day Party, and I still have a few thank-you’s to say... so here goes:

 

Thanks Michel for the mini-Stressful – having made a few larger ones, I can only imagine how fiddly these little guys must have been to make ... and at least I didn’t have any of them actually break in half on me(!). It’s sitting next to the bigger, clumsier ones that I made a little while back...

Thanks to Wil not just for a wonderful day’s puzzling and a fabulous Chinese meal afterwards, but also for the three little laser cut interlocking assemblies... two of them come with a picture of the target shape (both dodecahedrons, if memory serves) and the last one asks you to make something beautiful with the pieces...!

The green one (“clover”) goes together fairly easily and the pink one (“cherry blossom”) is a bit trickier as the overhanging edges are a lot larger and tend to get in the way and confuse things a bit more... I thought I’d finished that one and on inspection found that quite a few of the joints hadn’t actually been properly put together ... lovely little assembly challenge – particularly for us ham-fisted types!

 

The third one consists of 10 yellow triangles, and as I discovered after a while experimenting with various forms, the cuts aren’t all made equal (if you stack the other two sets of pieces in any orientation, the cuts always line up...with these ones, you need to rotate them to get them all to line up....) – OK so having noticed that, further exploration was a bit more fruitful and I realised that I could do something interesting with about half of the pieces ... and then added the second half in a similar vein, et voila – it’s beautiful ... and a little surprising!  Thanks Wil

 

Going back a little further even, I owe Tomas Linden a huge THANK YOU for all the extra goodies he included in my last order...

There was a large extra white box in with my last order and that turned out to be protecting a really neat wooden display case with a glass lid perfectly sized to fit three Hanayama Cast Puzzle boxes... inside there was a whole heap of extra puzzling goodies.

The first thing I noticed was a serious collector’s piece – an old Columbus Egg tangram puzzle, complete with its original packaging and challenge booklet ... I suspect that has just become the oldest puzzle in my collection – and it’s still in great nick.

There was also a fairly non-descript puzzle box that I recognised as one that Oli had brought to one of our very first MPP gatherings at my place a couple of years ago ... I think it’s an Alan Boardman design that it deliciously simple, yet thoroughly bamboozling if your haven’t seen it before – it fooled me for ages when I first saw it so I’m really chuffed to have one of my own now to inflict on the unwary ... rattling around inside it was a Tantrix key ring ... as I’d just ordered a set of the Tantrix Match puzzle sets in that order... (and I’ve been working my way through those on this cruise).

There were a couple of interesting little plastic baggies – one with a sticker on it saying “Take your lady on a movie night” – and inside there were six little flick-books each with its own fun little animation ...

The second little baggie had stacks of little odd-shaped pieces of curly birch (?) ... and the label explains this to be “Allard Walker’s personal FIX KIT for Symmetrick | Sloyd (c) 2013” – after the hard time I gave Tomas about how hard Symmetrick was as a puzzle, and how long I spent trying to build three dimensional solutions to it (in my defence, he has form there!) he’s given me a set of extra pieces to enable me to build just about any shape I’d care to build – now even I should be able to make something symmetrical flat on the table! Love it!

Thanks Tomas – not only a lovely surprise, but some wonderful puzzles to add to the collection – thanks for helping me fill up that new cabinet I added to the cave.