Playing – Ketchup

Haym Hirsh has been a prolific designer of 2D packing puzzles of late.  I suspect that he has 57 varieties by now.  I missed out on one of his recent puzzle designs when it first came out but I managed to snag a copy from Puzzle Paradise.  Now I’m playing Ketchup.  I wasn’t sure how well it would go in my collection but people tell me it goes with everything.

Ketchup is a 2D packing puzzle designed by Haym Hirsh and made by Nothing Yet Designs (NYD).  It consists of a red bottle-shaped tray with black highlights and 4 sets of white pieces consisting of a 5 and a 7.  The tray has a dedicated space to store one pair of 5 and 7s when not in the solved configuration.  The goal it to pack all 4 sets of pieces in the square section of the tray.

I anticipated solving this one quickly, but it made me wait until I fully explored it.  You notice early on that the square packing area seems one unit shy of making things easy, forcing you to attempt different ways of packing those 5s and 7s.  Although the 5s seem harder to pack, it’s always a 7 that you’re looking to place at the end.  In fact, it’s not all that difficult to pack everything except for a single 7.

And then to my horror, I saw it!  No, not the solution.  The fact that this is just another S&L puzzle!  (Nothing Yet Designs Release: 20 March 2025, 12:00 PM EDT)  Aghhhh!!!  Haym is just sneaking that S in as a 5 and the L in as a 7.  Will this turn out to be another crisis?

Crisis?

No.  No crisis here.  'Cause these are the good old days.  Where all the doubters are wrong, all the solvers are hard-working, and all the puzzles are above average.

It may have taken me a little bit of time but I managed to slip that last 7 into the tray.  All 4 sets of pieces where now nestled in the square area.  It was worth the wait.

And speaking of ketchup, the April release from NYD was yesterday with a couple of new designs and few restocks.  As mentioned in the last release post (Nothing Yet Designs Release: 20 March 2025, 12:00 PM EDT), this release was significantly scaled back as day-job requirements reduced production capacity at NYD.  However, NYD has just acquired another laser-cutter to widen the production pipeline a bit for future releases.