Osaka Puzzle Party

Here are all the photos from today.

Today was the day of the actual puzzle party, where people buy, sell, and trade puzzles. I had a whole bunch of stuff that I wanted to buy, so I made sure to get there right when the party started. There is sort of a mad dash at the beginning for the most popular puzzles, so you have to be quick to make sure you don't miss anything good.

The first thing I tried to buy was Secret Box, which was Rob Jones' exchange puzzle made by Iwahara of the Karakuri group. It is a beautiful puzzle box! He was in the middle of running around purchasing, so he said he'd hold one for me for when things calmed down.

Next I went by Robert Sandfield's table where I purchased this year's exchange puzzle, called Sandfield's Locked Drawer. Unlike most puzzle boxes, this one opens easily but is tricky to close. I solved the one that Matt got in the exchange yesterday and really enjoyed it.

After that, I went over to Perry McDaniel's table, where he was selling his series of Petite Fours puzzle boxes that are shaped like little cakes. He and his assistant were dressed up like chefs, which was pretty amusing, and the price list was set up like a menu. I purchased the full set of four puzzle from last year plus the new puzzle from this year.

As I mentioned yesterday, Pavel Curtis's puzzle looked interesting: it is a multi-layered puzzle where you need to arrange broken bits of lens in a magnifying glass shaped tray in order to unlock clues to a mystery. Pretty clever! I picked this one up as well.

I had been thinking of purchasing Dual Circle while I was back in the states, but $30 seemed a bit steep for what it was. There was a table that was selling them for half that price here, so I purchased it. It looked like an interesting sequential movement puzzle.

There was a table that was selling the full Karakuri Small Box series, so I purchased the one remaining box I was missing, #6. I also wanted to purchase the one Cube Box that I was missing (they are a set of four), but I forgot which number I was missing. Oh well!

Iwahiro Iwasawa was selling his MMMM puzzle which I wrote about a while ago and enjoyed, so I purchased that as well. He had also created another version called MMM which contains three modified M-shaped pieces rather than four, which was being exchanged by William Strijbos. I purchased one of these as well, hoping it would be as enjoyable as the previous version.

I was quite excited to find a single copy of Wasserhahn (Tap) by the mysterious "Roger" for sale and purchased that on the spot. I hesitated for a moment since it was fairly expensive, but this puzzle is quite hard to come by so I knew I would regret not purchasing it if I didn't. I'm looking forward to playing around with it: this series is quite difficult!

Phew, that's a lot of puzzles and a decent wad of cash. Here's a photo of all my loot, I didn't have time to take individual photos of all the puzzles:

Roughly left to right, top to bottom: "Get a Clue" by Pavel Curtis, MMMM and MMM by Iwahiro, five Petite Fours by Perry McDaniel, Secret Box by Iwahara (Rob Jones' exchange), Karakuri Small Box #6, Sandfield's Locked Drawer (Robert Sandfield's exchange), Sandfield's Unlocked Drawer, Wasserhahn (Tap) by Roger, and Fuji 1707 by Brian Young.

After the puzzle party, there was some down time, so I have been busy getting caught up on my blogging as you can see. (I'm probably not going to have an internet connection in Hakone, so this will be the last update for a while).

At 6:00, Kellian and I headed down to the banquet that marks our final night in Osaka. We sat at a table with all the other puzzlers who frequent RenegadePuzzlers who were in Japan: Matt Dawson, Phil Tomlinson and his son, Jim Strayer and his wife, Jeffrey Aurand, Stephen Chin, and George Bell. It was nice getting to hang out and chat with everybody, and the food was pretty tasty.

The two performances of the evening were good: there was a juggler who did some interesting manipulations that involved rolling balls inside a sphere and inside a tube. When rolled inside the tube, they seemed to defy gravity, which was quite interesting. The second performance used a number of props that folded in various ways and shifted between geometric shapes. It is hard to explain, but quite cool!

Tomorrow, we head over to Hakone, where the Karakuri Creation Group resides. I can hardly wait!

Puzzle Exchange Day

Here are all of my photos from today.

During every International Puzzle Party, there is something called the the Puzzle Exchange that you can choose to participate in. Each participant brings a copy of a puzzle that they have built or commissioned someone else to build, and they trade their puzzle with every other participant. This year, 74 people participated, which means that participants brought 74 of the same puzzle, and will go home with 74 new puzzles. Pretty cool, eh? As Brian Young gleefully put it on the ride down the elevator "It's Christmas morning for a puzzler!"

I wasn't eligible to participate this year, since it was my first year and they like people to watch their first year so that they can see the quality of the puzzles that people create. Instead, I was assisting Matt Dawson with his exchange. Assistants are handy because there's lots of schlepping puzzles around and keeping track of who you've traded with.

This was Matt's first year exchanging, and he brought a hell of a puzzle: it is called Ambidexterous Hexdous and it was made by Robert "Stickman" Yarger himself (a brilliant puzzle box designer and maker). It was designed by Matt and consists of two puzzle boxes that must be used together in order to open both, similar to the Salt and Pepper Shakers puzzle. I'll write a more detailed entry on this puzzle later, though in brief it is a great puzzle. It will be for sale on PuzzleParadise.ca shortly.

The exchange was a ton of fun: I got to see all the different puzzles that folks were exchanging and Matt introduced me to all of the other participants. Many bring extra copies of their puzzles to sell in order to offset the cost, so I was keeping a list of which ones I wanted to buy the next day.

The top two on my list were puzzle boxes: one was presented by Robert Sandfield and made by Kathleen Malcolmson where the puzzle is to shut the a drawer rather than to open it, the other one was presented by Rob Jones and made by Hiroshi Iwahara of the Karakuri Creation Group!

I can't really go into detail on all the exchange puzzles, but check out the photos to see some of what was exchanged. Some other highlights are:

• Newton's Egg by Stephen Chin where the puzzle is to open a wooden egg using Newton's laws
• "Get a Clue" by Pavel Curtis which is a multi-layered puzzle that consists of packing broken lense pieces into a magnifying glass tray, then following the clues to reveal a mystery
• The Slider by Bill Cutler which is an interesting burr-type puzzle
• Fuji by Brian Young where the task is to make the wooden mount Fuji errupt

Like I said, lots of other good stuff, but I don't have time to go through all of them right now. Plenty more puzzling to come. Check out the photos from today for more.

After the exchange, I camped out in the design competition room for a while longer. Again, I'll post more details on the individual puzzles when I return since there are a bunch of them.

After that, I met up with Kellian for dinner and we returned to the hotel and hung out in the lobby for a bit. Stephen "Chinny" Chin brought a bunch of his puzzles down, which was a lot of fun. One of my favorites was La Bomba, which opens similarly to Kamei's Egg, but has electronics inside that generate a ticking and a boom sound once you've opened it. Pretty cute! Check out the photo's for more of Stephen's awesome work.

That's all for tonight! The next day is the puzzle party where all the buying and selling happens!

Bus Tour and Founder's Reception

Check out the full set of photos from this day here.

The next day, we were signed up for the bus tour of Kobe Science Museum and Osaka Castle, so we got up bright and early and grabbed some breakfast at the hotel. When we got on the bus, we found out that we were actually also going to the Arima Toys & Automata Museum, which I was pretty psyched about.

On the bus, I sat next to Duncan Ramsey and Kellian sat next to Diniar Namdarian. The drive was over an hour, but the museum was quite cool. There were several floors, the first of which had all sorts of old German toys. The most interesting thing for me was these decorations that had fans on the top that were powered by candles that were lit underneath. They powered small turntables with figures on them.

The next floor had a bunch of more free form puzzles and creativity toys, such as various blocks, ramps for marbles, and such. There were other toys such as shoot-the-moon, and many Naef play objects.

My favorite floor was the next one, which contained tons of automata: contraptions that move when you turn a crack, usually animating a character of some sort. I think the coolest one was a large green dragon which looked quite impressive. Unfortunately, a lot of them were under glass so you couldn't actually see what they looked like moving. There were some, however, that were hooked up to a button so that when you pressed the button the crank would be turned electronically.

The last floor had a model train, which I found to be somewhat less interesting. Time was limited, so I didn't spend much time there. While we were perusing the exhibit, I got a chance to speak to Dick Hess, which was really cool since he is literally wrote the book on wire puzzles. I told him how I spent a year trying to figure out his Yak puzzle and how I enjoyed several of his other designs. He's a really nice fellow and we chatted for quite a bit. He has travelled in China so Kellian enjoyed speaking with him as well.

On the ground floor, there was a gift shop where puzzlers were bustling around purchasing various toys. I bought Karakuri Small Box #4, since they were out of stock on the Karakuri web site and the price was the same. It is a cute little puzzle that is nicely made, as is the rest of the series. It looks similar to Small Box #5, with the raised base. The mechanism is not bad, but I was disappointed to find that it was pretty much the same as the Ribbon Box from Bits & Pieces. Oh well!

I also had a chance to meet Marcel Gillen, who is known for his interesting designs that were machined out of aluminum, such as his series of chess piece puzzles where the object is to open them up. His pieces were produced by Bits and Pieces, though none of them are available anymore. When Marcel learned that Kellian didn't have any plans for during the puzzle exchange, he mentioned that his friend, Rene Dawir, could use and exchange assistant if she'd like to participate. How thoughtful!

After the museum, we got back on the bus and headed to lunch. Lunch was tasty, and Kellian and I sat with Alan Rolfs and his wife. After lunch, we got back on the bus and headed to the Kobe Science Museum.

I like science museums since there is usually plenty of stuff to fiddle with, and this was no exception. There were a bunch of different exhibits, but we spent most of our time in the technology exhibit and the mechanics exhibit. One of our favorite demonstrations was this huge parabola you could whisper into that reflected your voice against a 45 degree wall and towards another parabola, where your friend could hear you perfectly.

After that, we headed over to Osaka Castle. The castle itself was nice, though it was re-constructed fairly recently so the interior is not at all historic. The view from the top of the city was great, Osaka is huge! The main attraction of this site was not the castle, it was the impossible joint that can be found in one of the beams in its construction.

If you look closely, you'll see that it couldn't be slid together like a normal dovetail joint due to the angular bump on the adjacent sides. A small model of this was given to everyone as a gift from the IPP organizing committee.

At this point, we were pretty tired so we were happy to be heading back to the hotel. Due to traffic, we got in a bit later than anticipated so we just had a few minutes to clean up and change before heading to the Founder's Reception.

At the Founder's Reception, Jerry (shown here) welcomed everyone to the 30th International Puzzle Party and spoke for a few minutes. The food was pretty good with lots of sushi to start out with. Kellian and I sat at a table with Matt Dawson (shown below), John Moores and his son, Leon and Allan Stein of PuzzleMaster.ca, and Teddy Sakamoto of Hanayama.

When I heard that Teddy worked for Hanayama, I told him that Hanayama Cast Vortex and Cast Duet were actually the first puzzles I ever bought! When we were leaving, he gave me a copy of Cast H&H, which was really nice of him. Thanks Teddy!

It is a design by Oskar van Deventer, and is a level 5 out of 6. I tried it for 30 minutes or so and haven't had much luck with it. I look forward to solving it and will write more about it when I do.

Finally, it was the moment I had been waiting for: the 2010 Design Competition room was about to open, and I would finally get to try out a whole bunch of new puzzles! Unfortunately, it is going to take me a very long time to write about all of them, so I'm going to have to save it for after I return.

I puzzled until they kicked me out at 10:00 when the room closed, and hung out in the lobby with some other puzzlers until it was time to go to bed. What a day! And tomorrow was going to be the puzzle exchange!

Arriving at Osaka

Today was the day I have been waiting for for several months: Kellian and I were arriving at Osaka for the start of the International Puzzle Party! After some sightseeing in Kyoto, we headed to Osaka by train. Once we got in, we took a cab from the train station to our hotel.

As we expected from the price, the hotel was pretty swank compared to our previous accomodations. We headed upstairs to drop off our bags and get cleaned up a bit before going to the registration table. I picked up my registration packet, my t-shirt, and got my photo taken. Needless to say, I was extremely excited.

While registering, I bumped into Jeff Aurand and Matt Dawson, which was really cool. I had been talking to Matt for a while online but never met him in person! They headed back up to their rooms, so Kellian and I headed down to the lobby to see if we could find anybody else and to to take a look through the registration information.

While in the lobby, we bumped into Stan Isaacs and started chatting while we were waiting for the others. It is quite handy that the IPP folks have nametags, so it is easy to spot other puzzlers and know who I should be introducing myself to. We tried to get some folks together for dinner, but didn't have any takers, so the three of us decided to head out to find something.

Kellian got a recommendation from the front desk, but when we walked out there it turned out to be closed. Oh well! The place next door looked pretty good, so we decided to check that out instead. Interestingly, it turned out to be a place that served food from the island of Okagawa. The staff didn't speak English and the menu was in Japanese without any pictures, so we were having a bit of trouble figuring out what to get.

Fortunatly, another one of the restaurant patrons was kind enough to give us a hand and ordered a few dishes for us. Some were better than others, but overall it was pretty tasty. We had pork in some kind of sweet sauce, tofu and spam (!?) in some kind of sauce, chips made from a bitter vegetable, fried rice with seaweed, and osaka soba noodles.

The woman who was helping us and the waitress noticed our puzzle party bags that they were giving out at registration, so we started talking to them about puzzles. Fortunately, Stan had a few examples handy and pulled out a tanglement puzzle and some twisty puzzles. To my surprise, they were two of the latest designs by Oskar van Deventer: the Overlap Cube (a 2x2x23 cube), and More Maddness. Both were very neat and I wish I had more time with them, but I didn't want to go scrambling Stan's puzzles!

After dinner, we headed back to the hotel where there were a ton of people in the lobby hanging out and talking. I met Brian Young, Laurie Brookenshire, and even Oskar van Deventer himself! We all chatted for a while, and some folks showed around some of the puzzles they purchased from local shops in Osaka. I hope I didn't miss out on all the good stuff!

Sorry for not going into more detail, but it is about 1:00AM not and I need to get to sleep. Also, sorry that there aren't any photos...they aren't uploading for some reason. I hope it isn't a permanent issue! I will try again tomorrow. Update: Ok, I figured out how to add a few picures, it doesn't work over the hotel connection, but if I hold the computer up to the window I can get free wireless that works, but it is very slow.

Puzzle-In Visit

I've been posting some non-puzzling details of our trip to Japan so far in my travel blog here since I didn't want to clutter up this blog with tales of sightseeing in Japan. However, today we went to Naoyuki Iwase's puzzle shop in Kyoto, Puzzle-In (葉樹林), which was a ton of fun.

We had a bit of trouble finding it: it was raining and we were a distance away, so we decided to take a cab. However, the cab driver didn't quite know where it was and ended up dropping us off about 3 blocks away saying that it was nearby. We looked around, and couldn't find it, so we wandered in the direction where I thought it was, based on the map on the Puzzle-In website.

We showed the address to a few people, but they didn't know where it was. Luckily, Kellian and I stumbled across a post office and, amazingly, one of the postal workers actually walked outside with us and walked with us for a block to get us headed in the right direction (since we clearly spoke no Japanese and she didn't speak much English). Sure enough, we found it!

Much to our dismay, the sign in the doorway said that it was closed! Undaunted, we poked our heads in, since the door was actually open.

Sure enough, a friendly fellow welcomed us in. I introduced myself and said that I was an IPP attendee, and he introduced himself as Naoyuki Iwase, but said that his friends called him Osho.

The shop was pretty amazing: it was completely jammed full with puzzles. The assortment was so incredible that I asked Osho if some were part of his collection. It turned out that the back 2/3 of the shop was his personal collection, which made more sense. His collection was really incredible, there must have been thousands of puzzles packed on the shelves and hanging from the walls.

This photo was taken facing the back of the shop, and gives you a pretty good idea of how many puzzles there are. On the left, and above the doorway, you can  see he has a bunch of disentanglement puzzles. On the right are all sorts of assembly puzzles. Through the doorway was a glass cabinet full of puzzle boxes, impossible objects, and various other things.

Here's a photo of the front of the shop, it is much smaller than the other area but there are a bunch of cool puzzles for sale, many of which were designed by Osho himself! I hardly knew where to start looking.

Kellian and I started off by looking at Osho's incredible collection. There were some puzzles that I recognized, and tons that I hadn't. Osho particularly enjoys impossible objects, and he showed us a few of them. Here's Osho showing an impossible object he created to Kellian.

This was completely baffling: the two fake bills were seemingly woven together. I have absolutely no idea how he could have done this. It was quite clear that it hadn't been cut and re-attached, and it doesn't seem like there is any other way to do it. As Osho would exclaim after showing us each one: "Impossible!"

I spotted a few tops that he had, and asked if he knew Stephen Chin, another puzzle enthusiast who was a fan of tops. He said that he did not, but pulled out a box of neat tops. One that I had never seen before was a Japanese design that sort of wobbles on its side and shows a short animation while doing so. Very cool! I didn't get a photo, but here's another design that has a similar property. You 'spin' it by pressing down rapidly on one side with your finger. It was made out of two film canisters glued together. Depending on which side you press, the animation is different.

Here's a photo of one corner of his collection. There were all sorts of interesting puzzles: some of the Sandfield  brothers' dovetail puzzles, Marcel Gillen puzzles, Bill Cutler, and a number of things I didn't recognize. On the right is the cabinet containing a bunch of impossible objects. There were also a lot of Japanese puzzle boxes, including some Kamei originals like the Hamburger, Dice Box, Stacked Disks, and Coffee Cup.

On the shelves I noticed this interesting version of the Instant Insanity puzzle that uses coins rather than colors. I know Rob Stegmann is a fan of this puzzle, so I snapped a picture in case he hasn't seen it already. Sorry I didn't get all the sides so you could draw the graph and see if it is isomorphic to the original!

After checking out his collection for a while, we headed up to the front of his shop to see what he had for sale. There were a bunch of puzzles that I hadn't seen before, many of which were his own design. He has created a number of tray packing puzzles, as well as burrs.

One of which was called Cat Puzzle, and had four cat-shaped polyomino pices that you had to pack into the tray. He said it was very hard and that I could have it as a present if I could solve it. I was intrigued but figured it must be really difficult if he would make such an offer. I spent about 20 minutes or so working on it, but didn't have much luck. I would have worked on it for longer, but didn't want to bore him and Kellian, so I ended up buying it.

I also saw that he was selling a Japanese version of Lunar Lockout by ThinkFun, so I decided to buy that as well. I hadn't seen it for sale in a while, so I thought this would be a good chance to get it at a reasonable price.

Also, I noticed that he was selling Rubik's Clock, which I also haven't seen for sale much, so I decided to pick that up as well. There was a ton of other stuff I would have bought, but I figured I better take it easy with the puzzle party coming up. There are sure to be a bunch of other puzzles I'm going to want to buy!

I was able to solve this one in about 30 minutes when I got back to the hotel, which I was pretty pleased about. I like these types of sequential movement puzzles (when I can figure them out!)

Osho was kind enough to give me a neat piece of origami folded by his friend Fuku-shima. It is flat, and when you hold it up to the light it looks ilke a 5x5x5 cube! He had all sorts of other combinations of dimensions, but I liked the cube the best. Very neat! He also gave Kellian the little spinny doodad that he is holding in the photo above.

What a fun trip! I'm glad that we made it over to his store while we were in Kyoto. It will be cool to see Osho again once the IPP gets under way. I can hardly wait!

Top This!

Ok, enough with the self-indulgent meta-posts and back to our regularly scheduled puzzling. Another one of the puzzles that I got from ThinkFun was Top This!. It looked like an interesting variation on the usual assembly puzzle, so I thought it might be fun to try.

Top This! consists of two sets of pieces, one is orange and the other is blue. Each set contains two copies of each of the five tetrominos, which are the five ways of arranging four squares. The puzzle was invented by two junior high students from Taipei, Yu-chuan Lin and Chun-yen Chou.

Each of the challenge cards shows you two orange pieces and two blue pieces, and your task is to arrange them in the same shape so that one could cover the other. In the harder challenges, you have three pieces of each color to arrange.

A pretty neat concept, since usually with assembly puzzles you are trying to make a predetermined shape out of a set of pieces. In this puzzle, you don't know what the final shape is. Instead, you need to figure out how two different sets of pieces can make one shape.

Another interesting thing about this puzzle is that it demonstrates how approaching a problem from a different angle can make all the difference. Sometimes I would try in vain for several minutes to arrange the blue pieces in a way that the orange pieces could cover them. Having no luck, I would then try to arrange the orange pieces so that the blue pieces could cover them and would solve it almost immediately. You wouldn't think it would make a difference, but it really does.

As with all of ThinkFun's graduated puzzles, the fourty challenges start out with beginner, intermediate, advanced, and expert. I got through the beginner and intermediates pretty quickly (maybe 30 minutes or so). The advanced were a bit tougher, some I got pretty quickly and others I spent a few minutes on. The expert ones were a bit tougher, as you would expect. I think I got through the whole set in between 1 and 2 hours.

I don't want to give too much away, but somewhere among the challenges is a neat little trick that stumped me for a while. I thought it was great that they only put it in once, since it really caught me off guard!

One thing that I didn't like as much about this puzzle was the feel of the pieces. I think a denser plastic would have been preferable to me. Also, I'm not a big fan of the bag to hold the pieces since I'm a little OCD and the bag doesn't fit in tidily with my other puzzles. I'd rather a box or something for them, but that would drive up the price.

Overall, Top This! is a neat little puzzle at a very reasonable price. Definitely worth checking out!

100th Post!

Whew, that's a lot of posts! Thanks to everybody who has been reading this over the past year! I couldn't have kept it up without all your positive feedback. I've had a great time writing and look forward to plenty more puzzling adventures in the future. Since I'm a numbers guy, here's some statistics:

• Pages: 260
• Words: 76,634
• Paragraphs: 830
• Sentences: 4,010
• Flesch Reading Ease: 70.4
• Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 8.0
• Page Loads: 29,426 (712 per week)
• Unique Visitors: 17,191 (416 per week)

It as been very cool seeing folks visiting from all around the globe. Since I've started, there have been visitors from 104 countries from Argentina to Vietnam! Here's a snapshot of where recent visitors have come from:

If you're sick of checking to see when a new entry has been posted, take a minute to sign up for the email notification on the right and you'll get an email every day there is something new to read.

If you're just joining us, here are a few of my favorite posts:

• How it Started
• A Curiosity Awakened
• Building My First Puzzle Box (my most popular post)
• Frand's Mind Bender (Part 1 and Part 2)
• My Puzzle Nemesis Vanquished!
• Stewart Coffin Visit

Have a favorite of your own? Post it in the comments below. Also, if there's something you like or don't like, let me know in the comments or contact me, and I'll try to make the next 100 posts even better! Thanks again for reading!

River Crossing

I recently had the chance to do some puzzle testing for Tanya Thompson at ThinkFun. If you're not familiar with ThinkFun, they're an awesome company that is responsible for bringing a lot of interesting puzzles to the masses. They're probably most well known for Rush Hour, but they have a large product line of other great puzzles as well, many of which have won numerous awards.

One of the products I tested was the 2011 refresh of River Crossing. It has a completely new set of 40 challenges, so they had some testers going through them to make sure they were classified appropriately and to see what we thought. In other ThinkFun news, they are also releasing 2011 refreshes of  Rush Hour, Tip Over, and Chocolate Fix! Each will have all new challenges, so that should be plenty to keep you busy for a while.

As a thank-you for helping test, they sent me a few free puzzles, which was quite kind of them! I was thrilled just to get a sneak peek at what they are working on, and the puzzles were a bonus. One of the puzzles that I received was the original River Crossing, and I was quite interested to see how it stacked up against the refresh.

In River Crossing, the objective is to get the Hiker from one side of the river to the other. There are stumps that are arranged throughout the river and planks that connect the stumps. The Hiker can pick up planks and put them down, but they must fit exactly between the two stumps (the planks are 1, 2, and 3 units long). The only catch is that he can only move planks that he can walk to: no hopping between the stumps. A bit confusing to explain, but it is quite intuitive: you can even try out a few challenges on the ThinkFun website. The puzzle concept was designed by Andrea Gilbert (check out more puzzles on clickmazes.com) and the physical version was created by Bill Mitchell. Graham Rogers and Serhiy Grabarchuk also contributed.

To make it easier to play, the planks have magnets in them, and so does the hiker. This lets you use the hiker to pick up the planks, which was pretty handy. It also keeps him from falling off while you're thinking. Tanya mentioned that the refresh wouldn't have magnets, so I'll be interested how it compares.

The puzzle comes with a plastic base with a bunch of holes in it, and the challenge cards are large enough to fit over the base. There are holes in the challenge card where the stumps are supposed to be inserted. The starting location for the planks is indicated by a shadow, though the shade of the shadow isn't much different from the shade of the water, so on several occasions I forgot to insert a plank.

It can take 30 seconds or so to switch challenges because you need to pull out the stumps, switch the card, and then put the stumps in. This isn't too bad, but for the easier ones you might spend as long setting the puzzle up as you do solving it.

Since I did the testing of the refresh the online version of the puzzle, I was quite interested to see how the physical version worked. In all, I think they did a really good job of it: the pieces fit snugly and it is easy to pick up the planks with the magnetic hiker. It takes a bit of getting used to, but is quite efficient once you do a few challenges. The hiker's bold hands-on-hips stance is quite fitting and cute graphics on the challenge cards are also nice.

The challenges are very well classified into different difficulty levels. I thought that they did a particularly good job in the first few Beginner challenges. Each one teaches you a little bit more, so you're sure that you understand the rules. The difficulty gradually ramps up as the complexity increases and you need to add more tricks to your repertoire.

I think that since I had already gone through the 40 challenges in the refresh, I found the original version to be a bit easier than I would have otherwise. I think I got through the whole thing in about 2 hours, and it probably would have taken me another hour or two if I didn't have some practice on this type of puzzle first. Still, I think these puzzles are slightly easier than the ones in the 2011 refresh: the refresh had a few that stumped me for 20+ minutes, which is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.

This puzzle was good at demonstrating how thinking backwards from the solution can help you solve a sequential problem. Sometimes it isn't obvious how to start out, but you can see how the end must go and work your way backwards. Even with this tactic, the advanced challenges can be pretty tricky!

I enjoyed it so much that I purchased River Crossing 2. I'll write a separate review of that later, since I'm still working on it. It is more difficult and adds two new types of challenges that are quite interesting as well.

Overall, River Crossing is a very cool puzzle and quite reasonably priced. Definitely check it out if you're into this type of puzzles!

Stanley Puzzle

Fellow renegade puzzler, Peter Wiltshire, found The Stanley Puzzle in Hoffman's Puzzles Old And New, a book published in 1893 that catalogues most of the puzzles available in the 1890's in London. Peter made himself a copy, which he brought to IPP29, and at the urging of a few interested collectors, decided to make a few more. In all, he made 7, one of which I purchased from him on PuzzleParadise.

Here is the entry in Hoffman which describes the puzzle. It was stamped from brass and bears the picture of Sir Henry Morton Stanley, known for his exploration of Africa. He also supposedly uttered the famous phrase "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" during an expedition aimed at finding the Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone.

Peter's version of The Stanley Puzzle is made out of aluminum using a jigsaw and a file. It has been polished to a good shine and looks quite nice!

Upon receiving the puzzle, I started working on it right away. The purpose, of course, is to remove the ring. At first, it appears impossible, since both of the flat pieces are too large. With a bit of fiddling, I was able to figure it out without too much difficulty.

I brought it over to a friend's house yesterday, curious to see how difficult they would find it, and both of the folks who tried it were able to solve it without much trouble.

I think the only downside is that the solution is a bit simple for my taste, but I still found it enjoyable. This will be a good one to show to people who get frustrated easily, since it isn't too tough. Overall, a nice little puzzle!

More Small Boxes from Japan

A while ago, I wrote about a few boxes I got from the Karakuri Club's Small Box series. I really enjoyed these puzzles, and they're quite reasonably priced so I decided to order a few more. I tried ordering #4, #5, and #7 (the only ones that were in stock that I didn't have), but they replied that they were also sold out of #4. Oh well! I'll have to grab that the next time they decide to make some.

My order arrived a few days later (I'm always amazed by how fast things arrive), and I eagerly got started working on them. I like doing things in order, so I started out with #5 first. It had the telltale rattle of a hidden mechanism, so I had a feeling that it was going to be pretty tricky. After a few minutes of making no progress, I decided to switch over to working on #7.

The Karakuri Small Box #7 was quite nicely crafted, as are all the boxes from the Karakuri Club. It is made out of Katsura and Teak. One thing to note is that the Karakuri emblem is not inlaid, like it is in the rest of the series. Instead, it looks like it was stamped with a hot implement. Still, it looks nice!

I inspected the box briefly and was able to discover the first move quite quickly. It is a bit unusual, which is required for the way that the mechanism works.

On the website, the description says that the second move is 'unexpected' but I found it to be pretty much what I expected. Perhaps it is slightly different than more standard Japanese puzzle boxes, but I have seen it several times before.

After this, I was unsure how to proceed. Nothing else moved that I could find, so I spent a few minutes wiggling things trying to figure out how to get it apart. All of a sudden, it popped apart in a pretty unusual way, which is always a nice little surprise.

I think it took me about 10 minutes to figure this one out, which is longer than the other boxes took me, if I remember correctly. I think most folks will be able to figure this one out without too much difficulty. Overall, a neat little box!

Now, back to Karakuri Small Box #5! I neglected to mention that this box has a slightly different appearance from the others. This one has a 'base' at the bottom that you can't really see in the picture. This box is crafted out of Maple (KK-5-2).

Here's a snippet from the description on the Karakuri Club website that I found intriguing:

Even though you try to open it in your hands, it isn't easy to open. You may not think you need a desk, but it sincerely is helpful to solve the puzzle.

This definitely piqued my interest, so I was eager to see how it worked. As I mentioned, since the box rattled when I moved it, I was pretty sure that there was some kind of hidden mechanism involved. As such, I tried all the standard things you try with a hidden mechanism puzzle: I tilted it, I whacked it, I shook it and I spun it in various orientations, all to no avail!

I sat and thought about it for a bit, and tried to peer in the slight gap along the bottom to see what the mechanism was, but that didn't help much. I fiddled around with it a bit more, and quite surprisingly it started to open! However, my finger slipped and it shut and locked again. Darn!

I tried to reproduce what I did before, and I was able to get it to open. Unfortunately, the mechanism was not visible, so even opening it doesn't reveal the secret. Eventually, after playing around with it a bit more, I was able to get it to open reliably. The solution is quite clever and it must be an interesting mechanism that enables it. Very cool!

I was quite satisfied with this box as well. I found it to be fairly difficult, I think it took me a good 10-15 minutes to figure out. I'd be curious to see how my non-puzzler friends find it. I'm looking forward to trying out the rest of the series: I still need #4, #6, and #8.