Packing puzzles from a new Japanese designer

 

From the Japanese designers, we all know MINE and Yuu Asaka, both know for the top quality packing puzzles.

I came accross a new designer who is designing and making plexi packing puzzle. What about the quality? What about the solve? Let's see that in details!

Acazu, the name of the designer, has made several packing puzzles and I was intrigued as nobody has ever reviewed it so far.

 

Opera

His easiest packing puzzle consisting of 5 pieces to pack. Don't be fooled by the mentioned difficulty, it's more difficult than you can expect. To be honest I randomly put pieces and....solved. Took me a bit of time but I managed to beat the puzzle! A good warm-up for his more difficult puzzles. Difficulty mentioned: 1/5. In my opinion it's: 2/5

 

Solahai

5 pieces to pack with one circle being divided into halves. Will they remain together at the end? Sorry, no spoilers!

I am a bit disappointed by the puzzle because I found a solution and a friend of mine who played with it found another solution, his being more elegant. So I guess mine was just being made possible by a slighly tolerance issue. It took me way too long to find even one solution. So honetly the mentioned difficulty of 2/5 is not really accurate. I would give a 3.5/5

 

Shallows

This puzzles has been submitted to the international puzzle party design competition but did not get any prize. I like the shape of the puzzles and obviously you will understand that the little small piece will challenge you. It took me also a bit of time to figure it out, but I guess this is somehow pretty satisfying. Difficulty mentioned: 2.5/5. Again I would give a 3.5/5

Quartet

I would have expected music shaped pieces due to the name but the pieces look like more trees / candle, but anyway this gives a nice look. By putting the pieces inside the frame you will understand normally if 2 pieces could fit together and normally also at some point will be use a different approach because no matter you put the pieces in an "usual" way, they won't fit. 

I agree with the difficulty of 3/5. It's easier than solahai in my opinion.

 

About the quality of each puzzle, nothing bad to say. They are well made. I am still a bit "puzzled" about the fit as it's pretty tight and one may want to push a bit the pieces inside the frame...Also as I said before I should not have been able to find a second solution for solahai if the puzzles was perfectly made.

 

Now, what about the solutions? (no spoilers!)

To be honest, I am disappointed by the solution. They are not very beautiful if compared to Asaka's puzzles. For Asaka's puzzle, you usually have a nice looking solution, sometime with a symetry. Here not at all, just pieces put inside a tray. Yes, that is the goal of a packing puzzle, but well...

Also the pieces are cut in weird way just to confuse you, especially for quarted and solahai. You will clearly see that you cannot fit 2 pieces without gaps. And that also gives the feeling that the design of the pieces are somewhat "random" without any intention neither to have a nice looking solution, nor to have clear "relationships" between the pieces...

 

Of course, if you're into (challenging) packing puzzles, they will suit your taste. From my side, he is not my favourite Japanese puzzle designer.

 

When you have several anti-slide problems with one puzzle...

 .... it can only be good ! And you get more fun !

A couple of anti-slides packing is a puzzles with 3 different challenges designed by Vladimir Krasnoukhov.

As the name of this puzzle implies, there are two anti-slide tasks to this puzzle and one bonus packing challenge.

Task 1: Pack the pieces of Set 1 into the tray so that no piece can move ('anti-slide')

Task 2: Pack the other four pieces in Set 2 into the tray so that no piece can move and that the pieces will form a symmetrical shape at the same time.

Task 3: Pack all the pieces into the tray

I find this little guy very interesting for the several challenges and the look of the solution (yes I solved all the 3 puzzles!).

I fiddled a lot for the challenges but the goal can help you a bit. Indeed for one challenge it's mentioned "symetrical shape" so you can try several symetry shapes and check if the result can fit inside the tray.

Actually I thought that the symetry stuff added more complexity, but not all all because the solution has to be symetrical and if it's not symetrical you cannot fit the pieces :)

The solutions are really rewarding and you can admire the genius mind which created these puzzles !!

I cannot remember if the puzzle arrived with Task 3 solved, but I bet so as it's easier to pack safely the pieces during shipping. 

So I would advise you to scramble the pieces behind your back or ask for a friend's help :)

In all honesty, I had great fun with the puzzle and I advise at 100% to buy it. If you love anti-sliding packing (as I do) you won't be disappointed and if you love plexi and/or Vladimir's puzzles, then it's also a must-have in your collection.

You can buy the puzzle at Puzzle Master webshop

Hardcore packing puzzles

The title of the post means everything....and sorry but I cannot draw a complete conclusion as I have not solved yet any of these 2 puzzles....

I like packing puzzles, especially the beautiful ones and the ones with an elegant solution. That does not mean I am good at solving them...!!

I wanted to introduce 2 packing puzzles designed an made by Abhishek Ruikar. The first one would perfectly suit the X-mas period as it's called "snowflakes" with the goal of putting the 6 flakes inside the tray. 

By looking at the shape of the flakes, you will immediately understand where the difficulty is... :)

And for the mathematical guys around here, you may even compute all the possible combinations, there are thousands!

I liked a lot to fiddle with this puzzle. Maybe I will manage to solve it one day....

Second puzzles I played with from the same designer is called Clouds with the goal of packing the 9 clouds in the sky tray. Same story: I failed at solving it....so far. Persistance is key when trying these kind of puzzles though!

Here you will have fewer constraints than with the flakes as you will have to consider the cloud shapes on their entirety while you needed to take into account the protuded parts of each flakes for snowflake puzzle. Don't get me wrong, it does not mean that it's easy.

I tend to think that cloud is the easier of these 2. Both are super challenging (and well made!) and you will have plenty of fun for the money. Great ROI !

Some recent Yuu Asaka's

Yes I know I reviewed before some packing puzzles in the same spirit as the Yuu Asaka's tricky packing puzzles, but this time I will speak about 2 pretty recent ones Green 13 and Record 6

So as a warm-up: record 6 !

Record 6 is a nice puzzles composed of circles. Personally I like that the tray has not the same shape as the previous puzzles. It's always nice to see some differences in the tray and I like that one. I bet that you understand a bit how you will have to proceed with this puzzle. Despite being the easiest Yuu's and despite it's mostly trials and errors, I enjoyed it a lot.

It does not have to be hard to be enjoyed and that gave me a nice puzzling journey. Each plexi circle has some small holes of protudent pieces that need to fit inside other holes. Basically when I mean "trials and errors", it's because you will try one configuration, flip the piece, and do so again and again for each piece. At you should solve it soon this way. Jigsaw 16 and Bird 11, his other "trial and error" puzzles were harder but less enjoyable from my point of view.

As usually the quality is wonderful and the fit is perfect. This is a puzzle that you can easily share with a friend while avoiding frustration (due to the difficulty).

Green 13 is probably, on the opposite, one (if not the most) of his most difficult puzzles. Luckily for you there is no trickery with the pieces: you need to pack the green pieces inside the tray and the white rounded pices inside the holes formed by the shape of the pieces. I was sure there was something tricky there and the the white pieces must be put in some "unusual" place, but not at all. 

But clearly it maybe make the solve easier, but definitely not easy at all, and will require many hours of thinking.

I enjoyed it but I prefer something a bit less challenging though :)

Now, when will Yuu be making puzzles with triangle shapes??

You can buy Record 6 on Puzzle Master wbeshop, same thing for Green 13 !!

Some Siebenstein-Spiele

Don't even try to pronounce "Siebenstein-Spiele", you better just solve the puzzles :)

Siebenstein-Spiele is famous for puzzles that usually combines wood and plexi and many have also some coins to free as goals. Many are mazes, but not all. So in this post, there will be one maze and one that is definitely not a maze!

Euro-Falle 03 is a cute puzzle that belongs to a pretty big series of euro coins from the same designer. 

It's composed of 4 screws and I notices that 3 of them were a bit loose. So I unscrewed them. Of course, if I tell you that, then you should immediately see this not as a spoiler (because it's not the solution). And... puzzle solved!!

So I realized that was not the solution (and if it was, then it would have been super disapointing) and I managed to see the mechanism and the way it should have normally worked. Nothing really new about the mechanism, so don't expect something amazing. There is one step that I don't like and a nice step as well. I keep secret the number of step.

I recommend the puzzle if you have the other in the collection or if you like coin puzzles. If you're lookingfor a serious challenge, that may not the puzzle that suits your taste. I don't mean this is an easy puzzle though.

As for the other puzzle, the maze one, it's called "safe". I have to say that the name of the puzzle is pretty well found because the coin to release is safe as it's a challenging puzzle. It's a 2 layer maze (one wooden layer and one in plexi) that you will have to rotate while moving the 2 pins. 

 

It's for sure a challenging puzzle!

At some point you will solve it, it's mostly try, try again and try one more time. I'm not even sure we can apply a reliable logic when solving a maze puzzle....

For sure it's well made, and if you're looking for a serious challenge, go for it! You will rewarded with a real coin, so actually you can replace the coin with a fake one, resulting in a cheaper puzzle :)

Both can be found on Puzzle Master webshop !

MisFit by Bozo - finally solved !!

I made a quick post about the new Bozo puzzle in September called MisFit. The quality is still top level and the tray has improved a lot, especially the cover lid.

I really like the fact that you have an empty space for the puzzle to get an initial configuration that does not spoil you the solution.

Ok so now, what can I say in this new post? Well....just that I finally solved the puzzle!!!

Of course I played with it a bit when I first made my previous post. But honestly you cannot really count on the previous attempts to remember and make significant progress. In fact, many pieces can be placed at many spaces, making it confusing and almost impossible to remember what you tried to do some days ago while playing with the puzzle.

So I sit down and played with it. It must have taken me around one hours to solve and at the end, still some pieces to move...and....SOLVED !

I would say this is a challenging one, more difficult than his broken heart puzzle.

solved. Picture over lighted to not spoil!

 

 

A must-have in your collection if you like challenging, tricky, well-made, plexi puzzles. 

I can only recommend to buy all of his creations, because they all have that little something extra special that makes his designs so awsome :)

You can buy them at Bozo's website!

And if you want to enjoy a 10% reduction, you can use my coupon code: RPW7ZMDYF6XZ

The reduction is applied an can be seen after you click on "checkout" button, then on the page you can apply the coupon code.

If you don't like the colors, Bozo offers you to choose other colors (like all white, all black, etc.), but I feel the colors of mine are the best!