I don't like this Osanori packing

Surprised?
Maybe!

Well, usually I love al the Osanori's packing puzzle: challenging, fun, rewarding, well made and well thought. What more do you want??

But this time I did not like so much one of his designs called Triangle Ring 3 that was recently released by Pelikan Puzzle Company.

 It's not the fault of Pelikan but of the design itself. Let me explain !

First thing first, the quality is still perfect: the pieces slide smoothly, everyting is here to enjoy your puzzle experience. Did I mention that the wood is, as usual nice, and that most of the time your have the choice of the wood ?

So with all these positive things why did not I like this puzzle?

Well, as I said many times before packing puzzle with too many pieces are not fun but frustrating. This is also why I like the Osanori's packing: they are composed of "only" 3 pieces and still they are nice and challenging.
This one has 5 pieces....not fun but frustrating (my opinion). Too many possibilities ...definitely not fun. This is not a secret (if you count the "blocks" of each piece), but you will have one hole in your cube and this is not super easy to figure out where it should go. Indeed the final shape of the cube must not show any hole nor half-hole on its outter sides.

The other thing that bothered me a lot if the shape of the cage. It does not stand itself !!!!!!
So when you try to put pieces inside you also have to maintain the cage.
Definitely not practical at all !!!!!!

And even when the puzzle is solved it balances a bit on one corner. But again this is due to the design of this "unstable" puzzle.

So, as of now, I won't take any Osanori's packing with more than 3 pieces. And there is plenty left to be made with 3 pieces, so better to concentrate on these ones.

Now do I recommend this puzzle despite I did not like it?
YES!
Because the quality is very good and you must have plenty of time now at home to play with it :)
And it's still good to try it. And again my opinion is not yours, so you will probably enjoy more this puzzle than I did.

When looking at Pelikan Website, this puzzle is sold out. But there are still 2 Osanori's packing left available and you really should hurry to buy them (I liked them! lol)

Get ready for more packing puzzles by Pelikan & Osanori !!

Quick spoiler: if you like Osanori packing puzzles, watch Pelikan Website because some are to be released soon!!

Note that most of the time, Pelikan sends the puzzle a bit packed. I mean, you won't be spoiled at all and it can even be a challenge to "unpack" them. Not sure if there are "shipping instructions" so that the puzzles are packed in such a way...

If anyone knows, please put a comment!!

This new one (the one I have solved so far) is called Triple 3.

3 weird pieces and a nice cage. Of course all the holes have to be filled with the pieces.

I managed to do 2 different "configurations" of the pieces. One was impossible to put inside the cage, the other one was possible, but was hard for me to see how to do.

So I started to put the pieces inside the cage and I quickly realized that there were more moves than what I expected :-)
This is also the fun part of these seemingly easy puzzles: how can an only 3-piece packing puzzle be challenging? And this is where you find all the genius ideas of Osanori !!

I must admit I had lot of fun solving this one and if you intend to take the other 2 packing by Osanori that will be released at the same time, then I would advise you to start with this one. In my mind, it is the easiest. The pieces danced in the cage during the solving process :-)

Remember to use all the properties of the cage to solve the puzzle....

About the difficulty, I would say that it is chalenging (like all Osanori's packing puzzles) but not super hard. It took my less than one hour, maybe less than 30 minutes? Hard to figure out the time when you're puzzling hahaha.

As usual, I love these packing puzzles!!

The other 2 will be tough I feel... some puzzling fun for sure !!

It is still available on Puzzle Master webshop!

Eggplant 1

This puzzle was part of a former release by Pelikan company and still designed by the famous Osanori

As usual, the puzzle is composed of 3 pieces and a cage to put the pieces inside. The fit is perfect and you should not have difficulties to put/pull/slide the pieces.

The big novelty with that puzzle is a rotation required to solve the puzzle. Basically this is not really a spoiler as you will soon notice that you cannot put all the pieces inside if you don't perform a rotation. Don't worry the rotation is not tricky and is easy to achieve!

The biggest challenge for me was to make the shape outside the cage (what I always do) sticking to the constraints of the box. Indeed, I managed to make a shape but each time, and disregarding the orientation of it, it could not be the right one...

Solved :)

When I finally managed to make what I considered (yes, I doubt about it because I could not put the pieces inside the box...) to be the correct shape, then I tried to put the pieces. When you know which rotation to make, and proceed step by step, normally you should manage to solve the puzzle. Of course it requires a bit of perseverance :)


I really like this one. Challenging but not frustrating. Original because of the shape of the box and because of the required rotation.

Definitely a must-have if you like these kind of puzzles!!

And as I said previously, I do hope that Pelikan will craft some other Osanori's packing puzzles. 

 

Solution here!

More packing puzzles!!

From the recent puzzle release of Pelikan, there were many packing puzzles designed by Osanori Yamamoto. I noticed that over the recent past release each time there were several Osanori puzzles. And I do feel this is great! First because not a lot of craftmen make these puzzles and also because these designs are so good!

So far I have solved 2 (ribbon and tulip 1) but I will talk about ribbon in this post. In my opinion, ribbon is the easiest (easiest, not easy haha). Tulip 1 was pretty hard and eggplant is still unsolved even if I have the shape (hopefully I am right) outside of the cage (which is a puzzle in itself!).

So ribbon is a packing puzzle composed of a cage (with a weird shape!) and 3 pieces. As for most Osanori, there are only 3 pieces, but the challenge is still there, trust me!

Two out of the 3 pieces are bigger and thus have bigger constraints to be filled inside the box. So it's easy to guess how they should be put inside the cage. Knowing that then you need to see how these 2 big pieces can be put and there are not a lot of ways to do so. You can deduce how to put the remaining piece.

It did not take me long to figure out the assembly outside the box. Putting them inside was way more difficult. Still it did not take me super long, let's say less than one hour for sure.

The shape of the cage makes it more difficult to "predict" the assembly/disassembly, because you can think that such or such piece can be slided in such a way, but then after careful observation you realize that it's not possible. And indeed it's pretty unusual I would say. Very different from many of his "cube-caged" packing puzzle.

I finally ended up with putting all the pieces inside. But I have surprised myself with some moves I did not predict. You know it's when you put the pieces inside that some moves appear possible while you did not think so few minutes ago! :)

I do advise this puzzle as well as the other packing puzzles currently on Pelikan webshop.
Grab them while you can, you won't be disappointed !

The quality is nice, the wood well choosen, the fit perfect (and it has to be, you know how I do care about the fit!) and of course the design is very clever!
I guess none of these are a real surprise.... :)


EDIT: eggplant solved now. So all 3 packing puzzles solved!! :) (egg plant is fun!)

Belt Cube 3

Guess what, Pelikan made it again! Well this is a preview because they have not officially released the puzzle. But then it gives you a tast of what to expect. And there will be 2 Osanori's packing puzzles: Belt Cube 3 and W-Windows.

I will speak about Belt Cube 3 as this is the only one of these 2 I have solved so far.

It's composed of a frame and 3 pieces like many Osanori's packing, but this time it gave me hard time to solve it!!

My usual technique is to make the shape outside of the box and then trying to mimic it inside. But due to the shape of pieces if was pretty hard to do so. Because first it's not that easy to keep in mind all the restrictions of the box, especially when this time you have 2 big openings! And moreover some pieces could be put pretty stable inside the box but totally unstable outside...

At one point I thought: I got it. I even thought I found a devilish solution implying rotations. This is not a secret (as you can find this information online): this puzzle does not require any rotations. But the "solution" with the rotation was pretty satisfaying except that....the past piece was impossible to pack and packing it with another was resulting in a missing cube, so the puzzles was not 100% solved!
Still, I was happy to see we could still perform a rotation inside :)

I needed to think again on another possibility and finally I ended up finding a pretty interesting "structure". So the difficult part started. I tried to perform the moves outside of the box but it's not that easy as you have to remember all the moves....and the first piece is removed after 10 moves!!! When I say "not that easy" I mean it !!

I still sorted that out and managed to put the first 2 pieces inside the box and then making 10 other moves and the puzzle was solved!
At the beginning when I saw the cage I though the structure inside would not stand well. But I can tell you that I was wrong! It cannot crumble by itself, it's very stable.

This is the 4th Osanori's packing puzzle I have tried so far and in my opinion this is the most challenging. But I may change my mind after playing with W-Windows :)
In my opinion, this is a very good puzzle. Not that easy, pretty challenging, but not overly frustrating.
I definitely advise it !!

It's not clear with the picture but there is a great wood contrast between the pieces and the frame. Pelikan will even offer 2 choices of wood color for each of these 2 packing puzzles.

They will be found HERE. I advise to check out the website often if you don't want to miss them as they have a lot of success and I don't think there will be stock left soon after the release....


EDIT: Pelikan has released the 2 packing puzzles by Osanori. You should be fast to get them. I solved W-window and I was right, it's even harder than belt cube 3. A challenge that is very satisfaying. I will review it later but I advised to get it as well while you can!! 

Solution here!