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!

Some wood from the Pelikan woods

Recently a package arrived somewhere from Eastern Europe, guess from where? From Pelikan company, what did you expect?!
They sent the package with priority mail and it took less than 1 week to come, that's a top quality service, you cannot deny it, and if the quality is as good, then I understand why so many people only say goods things about Pelikan!

I had a bit of time to take some quick pictures during the week-end and was luck enough that it's was pretty sunny (or not to rainy, depending your point of view).

That's my first order from Pelikan. Yes, I know I should be ashamed, but well I have never been a super fan of burr puzzles, and most of the puzzles they craft are burr puzzles. So guess what I ordered?.....burr puzzles!!

No, just joking, honestly....



I ordered the 3 wooden ball puzzles: convolution ball, Mochalov ball and the slideways ball

Back left: convolution ball / Middle: Mochalov ball  / Front: slideways ball

Three things that you notice first: they all come with wooden stand, which is very very appreciable since you may not always have stands for your puzzles (that usually stand whithout stands). The second thing you notice is the size of the puzzle: not small at all (9cm diamater for the 2 biggest). And finally you also notice the quality of the work!

The convolution ball designed by Stewart Coffin is made out of wenge and maple, the look is absolutely wonderful due to the the checkered pattern, the fit is perfect (well, same comment for the two other puzzles!!) which makes the solving process not easy at all. Indeed it's so precisely cut, not too tight (but tight enough not to fall apart by itself) and not loose at all. I managed to disassemble 2 pieces, but for the third one I wonder how to proceed, it's a puzzle after all ;-) I have not considered yet rotations which seem to be required (no spoil, it's written on Pelikan's website), that may explain why I am blocked...
But no worries, I will win!!! I just need to try it again :-)

The ball in the middle is designed by Leonid Mochalov, a Russian puzzle designer who has invented many puzzles and luckily some companies (because Leonid does not produce puzzles) like Pelikan decided to produce them. That would be a pitty it you see many designs, but never the puzzles...
What strikes you is the diversity of woods used: 8 different nice woods (purpleheart, wenge, mapple, padouk, american walnut, acacia, bubingo and jatoba). As far as I know, I don't know any other puzzles made with so many different woods, and these are not common woods. They are colorful, almost "precious", just judge by yourself below:

Wenge is one of my favourite woods, I love the grain and the natural lines of it.
Fit, quality and craftmanship are still on the top level for this puzzle!
The difficulty is first to find out which is (or are) the piece to take first. Then, it's pretty straight forward, but that's not so easy to start. It's more complicated to reassemble but not impossible at all. The design is clever, which makes the pieces hold to each other and not fall apart easily.
I think this is nice to have made another puzzle ball with different wood and different pattern, so that you can reallt differentiate which is the Mochalov one from the convolution ball.
Definitely a nice pair!

I could not have avoided the last puzzle ball made with simpler woods (cherry, acacia, mapple) but with the most original stand which results in making you believe that you have a real golf ball in front of you! Yeah, you have the ball you have the stand...Humm but I doubt you would like to use this wooden puzzle as a golf ball: too big and too beautiful of course ;-)
I like to have stand for the puzzle, but I also appreciate to have the name of the puzzle, of the designer and of the puzzle company written on the stand, and all three are gathered here.

This puzzles was designed by Ray Stanton and belongs to a series of 3 coordination-motion puzzles (I dont know what is the thris one, by the way) with all the same kind of mechanism but each time in a different shape, which makes the puzzles challenging even if you managed to solve the same with the cube shape for example.
This puzzle is tricky, tricky enough to trick you each time you try to solve it!
You need to push on specific pieces and usually there is one or 2 fingers wrongly places that prevent the pieces from moving. But once you find where to press, all the 3 pieces slide together! Very fun to play with. You can also solve the puzzle is you hold one piece, but you need to find the correct piece, not easy to see where a piece "starts" and where it "ends"...
And if you're really puzzles, well you can also spin the puzzle and the pieces will slide apart by themselves.

To conlude, very nicely crafted puzzles, super good quality. No wonder why Pelikan is one of the favourite wooden suppliers!!!


In case you're not familiar with Pelikan puzzles -your turn to be ashamed! - then look HERE.
They have still some puzzles on sale, but don't hesitate too long...