Time to Smother – The Blue Bird of Happiness

With a name like The Blue Bird of Happiness, you would expect this puzzle to have an upbeat theme.  However, the goal is to have the other jealous (or if you’re Mr. Mark - envious) birds, Miserable, Wretched, Gloomy, Woeful, and Mournful, smother Happy until it can’t see the light of day.  Yes, it’s time for Happy to have a case of the blues.

The Blue Bird of Happiness was designed by George Sicherman and used by Nigel Croot as his exchange puzzle at the 41st International Puzzle Party.  The puzzle consists of 6 pieces, with IPP41 debossed on each piece.  The pieces are 3D printed with each having a different color representing their personality.  Be careful not to confuse them!

As mentioned above, the goal is to place the blue piece on a flat surface and completely hide it using the other pieces.  Given the nature of the bird-like shapes, it’s not too difficult to discern the orientation of the blue bird required for the bottom of the pile.  One by one, you heap the Miserable, Wretched, Gloomy, Woeful, and Mournful birds on top until The Blue Bird of Happiness has vanished.

I didn’t find it very difficult to smother The Blue Bird of Happiness and I felt kind of sorry for him.  However, I needn’t have worried.  There were plenty of cracks for Happiness to seep through and like the phoenix, The Blue Bird of Happiness rose again to taunt the next puzzler.

C’est Ludique – Minima Ludique

 

J’aime la série de puzzles Minima.  Chaque casse-tête est un petit défi et ludique, surtout le puzzle du jour – Minima Ludique.

Minima Ludique was designed by Frederic Boucher and made by Nothing Yet Designs.  The puzzle consists of 4 Wenge and Mahogany V shaped pieces that have to be packed within a holey frosted acrylic box.  The packaging for the puzzle is well-thought out and holds the box with 3 pieces trivially packed inside with enough space leftover to place the 4th piece on top of the box.

Apparently you don’t have to worry about the apparentness of this puzzle.  It goes without saying that this puzzle is an apparent rectangular parallelepiped since the 4 pieces are comprised of 12 cubes that have to be packed into a 12 voxel space.  This lets you know that the last piece will simply slide in through the only 2 voxel opening in 1 move.  All you have to do is find out how to pack the other 3 Vs in preparation.

And therein lies the dilemma.  Getting those first 3 pieces into position takes a bit of thinking.  There are 2 tricky moves involved.  The first wants to happen and will pull you along with it.  The second will be less obvious and will attempt to resist you.  However, once you’ve accomplished it, it’s all over.

A few weeks after solving it, I looked at it and decided to put it back in an unsolved state.  Unfortunately, after the first piece dropped out, I couldn’t immediately determine how to release the other 3.  It’s not as if there are a lot of moves that you can make.  And then I saw it.  As during the initial solve, the key move doesn’t lend itself to being easily discovered.

Minima Ludique is a fun puzzle with some replayability for guys like me with no memory capacity.  Maybe I should design a Minima puzzle with lots of holes in the box – Minima Cerveau anyone?

Corner Table – End Table

International Puzzle Party (IPP) Exchange Puzzles come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes (and colors and materials and textures and …).  Although End Table is larger than you would expect and smaller than the name would imply, the name refers to the shape/location of the red square piece in the tray and not its size.

End Table wa designed by Goh Pit Khiam and was Khuong An Nguyen’s IPP41 exchange puzzle.  It’s 3D printed with a marble PLA tray and 6 translucent PLA pieces.  I didn’t want to risk breaking the puzzle by undoing the clips that hold the top in place but it looks like a nice mechanism.  They clips appear to be hinged on the top but I don’t believe in unnecessary violence to puzzles (except for the ones that I make – in fact abusing them is a necessary part of the design/manufacturing process and therapeutic to boot).  The translucent PLA used for the pieces allows you to see the infill pattern.  

It’s immediately obvious that this is a multi-color, apparent-rectangle, restricted-opening, 2D tray-packing puzzle.  The 5x4 tray has a 2 voxel opening in the side.  The objective is to place all the pieces in the tray through the opening with the red piece in the upper left corner (assuming that the opening is in the bottom left corner).  Never fear, there is a red square printed in the tray where the red square piece needs to go.  The pieces consist of 2 blue Is, 2 green Vs, 1 purple N, and 1 red O.

Windows for manipulating the pieces are very large.  The size of the puzzle is much larger than you would expect for this type of puzzle.  It makes handling the pieces easy.  I also found solving the puzzle to be easy as well although sometimes you just get lucky.  Placement of the pieces seemed logical with the red square restricted to the designated corner.

Just for fun, I tried packing the pieces with the red square in the other 3 corners without issue.  None were difficult.  However, after looking at the solutions that I came up with for the other 3 corners, I decided that maybe I did get lucky on the official objective since that solution had a property that the other 3 didn’t.

Easy As – Duck Soup

How many puzzles can you say are as easy as duck soup and be completely correct irrespective of the person attempting to solve it?  Well this one’s Duck Soup for everyone!

Duck Soup was developed by Guy Loel and David Goodman and entered in this year’s International Puzzle Party (IPP) Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition.  Although it didn’t win any awards, I thought it was one of the top stand-out puzzles in the competition.  It was well-themed, well-made, and a good challenge.  

There are 2 goals: the ultimate goal and a waypoint goal for encouragement.  The waypoint goal is to make a bland soup by packing all 7 ducks in the pot without the bouillon cube (with the lid closed of course – no legs hanging out of the side of the pot like in the kitchen).  If and when you accomplish that, you can add the bouillon cube to the pot as well for the ultimate soup experience.

No names for the ducks were provided so I’m going with Rufus, Pinky, Chicolini, Bob, Gloria, Vera, and Zander.  I managed to pack these 7 ducks into the pot in the IPP41 design competition room without the bouillon cube.  It was enough of a challenge to realize that I wasn’t going to obtain the ultimate goal at IPP if I wanted to spend time enjoying the many other puzzles in the competition.

When Duck Soup became available on Nothing Yet Designs, I grabbed a copy as soon as possible.  Continuing the theme, the puzzle arrives in a takeout box with everything you need to successfully make Duck Soup – a pot complete with lid, 7 ducks, and a bouillon cube just to spice things up a bit.  You don’t have to worry about the ducks making a mess.  The bottom of the box is filled with hay.  All the pieces are 3D printed and they are very well-done.  As well-done as the design competition version was, these are weller-done.  The ducks are so cute, who wouldn’t love them.  And the pot, most amazing pot ever!  Love that fuzzy skin.  However, I do have to say that I miss the magnets that held the lid on the pot in the competition puzzle.  Having 3D printed a few puzzles myself, I completely understand avoiding embedded magnets and I feel the tradeoff with the other enhancements like multicolor printing was worth it.

Working on getting that bouillon cube to dissolve in the pot at home, I think I discovered most of the 180 solutions of organizing the ducks in the pot without the bouillon cube.  And of course it was just as easy to add the bouillon cube and leave out Rufus (who was very grateful by the way).  

I failed to make the ultimate Duck Soup over several days.  The ducks were just not cooperating and free-ranging in my living room.  Did I mention that there is only 1 proper way to make Duck Soup?  At some point I stopped and decided that I needed to think like a duck.  If I were a duck, how would I cozy up to other ducks to waste the least amount of space.  Once I figured that out, it was Duck Soup!

The IPP design competition has so many great new puzzles designs that they can’t all be given a prize.  Duck Soup is one of those gems.  If you want one of your own, you can get it from Nothing Yet Designs when it is in stock.

Not ducks were harmed in the making of this blog.

 

One Person – Three Body Problem

At this year’s International Puzzle Party (IPP), I overheard Girish Sharma say that people smiled when he told them the name of his puzzle, Three Body Problem, during the IPP Puzzle Exchange.  I know it didn’t make me smile – maybe cringe-worthy.  All I could think about was complex coordinated movements in physics with no general closed-form solution.  Turns out I’m just socially stunted and not tuned in.  3 Body Problem is the name of a series on Netflix based on a novel by Liu Cixin.  However, I may have been on to something since the puzzle does indeed require complex rotational movements.

Three Body Problem was designed by Girish Sharma and used as his exchange puzzle at IPP41.  The puzzle is nicely made with Maple, Cherry, and Mahogany by Brian Menold at Wood Wonders.  And dowels were used to reinforce end grain glue joints.

The stated goal is to interlock the 3 pieces within a 4x4x4 space.  It also promises some rotational moves in the solve.  Removing the 3 pieces from the box, it’s obvious that they are not going to fill the 4x4x4 space and won’t even cover the exterior surface like the many amazing turning interlocking cube (TIC) puzzles created by Andrew Crowell.  I used to see this as a sign of an unfinished design but to be honest, this puzzle is awesome.

Although this puzzle calls for 3 bodies, I thought I would tackle it solo.  However, it took me 3 times longer to solve than I expected.  I sat down with it several times before I finally had all 3 pieces packed together.

The final assembly was never really much in doubt, although I was required to doubt it a little since it took so long to find the solution.  However, the rotation supported by the half corner cube pretty much forces you to believe in the assembly.  It’s that crazy dance of the third piece that eluded me several times.  The problem is that you need to envision it from the end back to the beginning and there are so many steps, it’s not easy to run through.  Along the way, I found some interesting moves that I thought would be required but didn’t lead anywhere.  Eventually, I found my way to the final assembly.

I also enjoyed coming back to it a couple of days later and found that it took me several minutes to get it back apart.  To say that rotations are required is an understatement.  Being a fan of rotations, I really found this to be a great puzzle.  I’m sure the Netflix series plot has many twists and turns if it is anything like the puzzle.

 

All Corners, No Corners – 4 Piece Jigsaw

4 Piece Jigsaw was designed by Haym Hirsh and used as his International Puzzle Party (IPP) exchange puzzle for IPP41.  As indicated by the name, there are 4 jigsaw puzzle pieces that have to be placed in a square area.  Of course none of the pieces have a straight edge, making them all edge pieces without an edge or since there are only 4, all corner pieces without corners.

The puzzle was made by Nothing Yet Designs using laser-cut acrylic.  Going with the US based IPP red, white, and blue theme (as opposed to, for example, a bleu, blanc, rouge theme for France), the puzzle was made with a white frame and red and blue pieces.  The frame consists of 2 layers of acrylic that are bolted together with the bolt caps acting as tray legs.  Mine needed some tightening, so make sure you don’t unexpectedly loose yours.

Typical jigsaw solving starts with separating edge pieces from middle pieces and then pulling out the 4 corner pieces from the edge pieces.  With only 4 pieces, you would expect all the pieces to look like corners, but you realize that this will be a puzzle without a clean exterior edge.  All the pieces are middle pieces.  It’s kind of like asking for an Oreo cookie without the cookie part.  Admit it, you know you wanted to.  Just the middle please!

Each edge of the puzzle pieces has either a knob or a socket with each piece having 2 of each on opposite edges.  The knobs and sockets come in either single or double size and can be located in the left, right, or center position, or in the case of the double size, 2 adjacent positions, which always includes the center. And unlike a typical jigsaw puzzle, the pieces don’t have a designated top and bottom, so they can go either way.

The first stage of attacking this puzzle is to rule out some often-used packing tricks.  After getting those out of the way, you basically know how the pieces are going to be packed in the tray.  I was anticipating an expected Aha while pondering whether the Aha was that there wasn’t an Aha.  Trying both Aha and meta-Aha assemblies, I eventually found myself at the solution – Ahahaha!

Being a puzzle designer myself, after I solved the puzzle, just for the hell of it, for no particular reason at all, not that I would ever think about it myself, I checked the kerf angle of the pieces to determine if they were all aligned with the orientation of the solved puzzle and it looked to me like it was.  So don’t cheat and orient the pieces based on the kerf angle, not that you would ever think to do that.  This isn’t a real problem with laser-cut cut pieces like 4 Piece Jigsaw since you really have to go out of your way to determine which way the kerf angle is oriented, but it’s a huge problem if you 3D print the pieces where there is an obvious plate side and top side.

4 Piece Jigsaw is the first of a series of jigsaw puzzles designed by Haym and available at Nothing Yet Designs.  JIGS4W (all 4 pieces are the same color) appears to be the new name for 4 Piece Jigsaw and the next 2 in the series are JIG5AW (3 sets of 5 pieces) and J1GSAW (10 pieces).

Packing a Small Basement – Minima Nest

Minima Nest reminds me of my basement.  It’s a small space that you have to pack with a lot of stuff.  Once the basement is full, you then pile stuff on the stairs until you can no longer get to the basement.

Minima Nest was designed by Lucie Pauwels and made by Nothing Yet Designs.  The puzzle is 3D printed with a black and white box and orange pieces.  The print embraces the requirement of printing the box in 2 separate halves by using a big contrast of color between them, effectively hiding the seam by emphasizing it.  Well done!  The use of contrasting colors for the name and designer on the puzzle are a nice touch as well.  The lettering is raised to provide a nice clean background without crazy slicer fill patterns.

Minima Nest is part of the Minima puzzle packing series started and mostly populated by Frederic Boucher.  The original puzzles in the series had cool names like M1, M2, M3, …, but I’m guessing that they ran out of numbers and had to resort to names instead.  To be honest, I’m not sure what the requirement is for being part of the series other than being nice packing puzzles.

The first thing to notice about Minima Nest is that the stairs are steep – a full voxel up but with only a half-voxel tread.  This is also obvious with the pieces having half-voxel shifts.  Of course, this provides a significant clue on how the pieces get packed.

I found this puzzle to be on the easy end of the spectrum, although it was not trivial.  Even though I try to avoid it, it did require some thinking.  It doesn’t take too long to realize that one piece has to go on the bottom and another has to go on top.  From there you can determine that the other pieces need to go in between and around these two (hopefully, you didn’t need that last revelation).

Once solved, Minima Nest is filled to the brim, just like a typical basement.  My favorite aspect of this design is that it is easier to experiment bottom-up, but solve it top-down.