Medallion

Medallion is another interesting take-apart puzzle designed by Oskar van Deventer and produced by Hanayama. The folks at Puzzle Master were kind enough to send me a copy to review. Thanks!

As with many of Oskar's puzzles for Hanayama, this one is a maze, perhaps more clearly so than some of his other work. However, as you would expect, there's a bit of a twist. The way you navigate the maze is by rotating the metal plate and sliding the left and right sides of the medal in and out.

This would all be fairly straightforward, except there's another, different maze on the opposite side! So you have to flip back and forth, figuring out how to proceed through both mazes simultaneously, which often requires doubling back on one side so you can advance the other.

There's nothing tricky about this one, it just takes a bit of time and patience to figure out what moves are required. That's a great thing about a puzzle like this, it is all fairly logical, but you still get a good feeling of accomplishment from figuring it out, since it is certainly not easy. This would be good to hand to somebody who has patience as long as they feel like they're making progress.

Medallion is fairly similar to Cast L'ouef, in that there are two mazes to be navigated. However the mechanism is simpler for Cast L'ouef since it consists of only two plates with pins attached to the maze plate.  If you enjoy one, you'll probably like the other: they're both probably worth checking out!

Another similar puzzle that I tried recently was Safe, which has pretty much the same mechanism as Medallion, only it is constructed mainly from laser cut wood rather than metal. Also, rather than disassembling completely, goal is to navigate the two mazes in such a way so as to release a coin. I think this is probably the most challenging of the three similar puzzles, though I think I prefer the aesthetic qualities of Medallion: it has a beautiful shine to it, and a nice weight in your hand.

The only downside I can think of to this one is that there is a small washer that you can potentially lose when you take the puzzle apart. Unless I'm missing something, I think it would have been better to include it in the casting than have it as a separate piece that can be lost.

Overall,  Medallion is a solid puzzle, definitely worth checking out if you like puzzles of this type. If you're not sure if you like puzzles like this, this would be a great one to start with.