Crafty Sunflower Release: May 2025

I was recently asked if I would be willing to review the 3 new Grabarchuk puzzles being released by Crafty Sunflower this month.  I usually think of the Grabarchuk family as prolific creators of pencil and paper type logic puzzles but they have a long history of designing physical puzzles as well.  I was happy to hear that 3 new ones were being made available.  After a quick peek of them online, I immediately responded with a Yes Please!  Two things had immediately caught my eye.  The first was of course, the puzzling challenge.  The second was packaging.  I was amazed at the amount of effort that was put into the packaging.  Each puzzle comes in a tray with a clear acrylic top to store the puzzle.

A few days after my exuberant reply, I received a small but dense package in the mail.  It included the 3 puzzles for the May release plus 4 puzzles from previous releases that will be the subject of a future blog.  The paperwork within the box also included a nice thank you note.  This capped the attention to detail that Crafty Sunflower had previously demonstrated in the friendly status updates emailed during the shipping process.

All 3 of the Crafty Sunflower May 2025 release puzzles were designed by Serhiy Grabarchuk and made from laser cut wood and acrylic.  And they’re all completely different.  There is a 3D interlocking puzzle, a 2D assembly puzzle, and a 2D sliding piece puzzle.  And they are available now at Crafty Sunflower!

Plank Box

Plank Box is a 3D interlocking puzzle with 12 planks that comprise a box with 2 planks on each of the 6 sides.  This was the one that immediately caught my eye.  It is exactly the type of puzzle I like.

The 12 planks come nicely packed in a tray with a clear acrylic lid that can be rotated to the side allowing the pieces to be removed.  The top of the tray has your typical puzzle information consisting of the name, designer, and manufacturer.  The bottom has the solution engraved on it, so don’t look at it until you’ve solved it.  The other interesting piece of information that is included on the bottom is that Plank box was designed in 1977.  That’s almost 50 years ago!

Removing the planks from the box, you can see that the pieces are neither all identical nor all unique.  2 of the pieces are marked.  One has the name of the puzzle and the other has the name of the manufacturer.  I decided to build the box with the information on the outside although I assume that it is just as easy to build it with the information on the inside.

How would the pieces go together?  Would it go together as 2 sliding halves, a sequence of sliding together multiple subunits, or simply a sequence of adding the individual pieces one by one?  Would it perhaps require coordinate motion?  Would pieces need to slide back and forth to add other pieces?

My first goal was to determine how the pieces would slot together, so I built a corner of the cube to test it.  Simple enough, so I decided to see how much of a cube I could build before getting stuck.  Needless to say, I was not able to build a complete cube using such a random process. 

Taking the unfinished cube apart, I laid out the pieces to give them a good look.  A quick tabulation exposed a discrepancy that hinted at a possible locking mechanism.  Starting with this mechanism, I started to build out the cube again – only to end up with mismatching pieces at the end.

In addition to not completing the cube, I was lacking a concept for what happens after the first step of the locking mechanism.  Giving it some further thought, I came up with a second move as well as what would be available for a third move.  I starting to rebuild the cube from here – only to end up with mismatching pieces at the end.

At this point, I decided that the best approach was to lay the pieces flat on the table as an unfolded version of the box.  This allowed me to see where pieces would match or not and easily shuffle them around until I had a workable layout.  Of course, once I had a layout, I hoped that it would be possible to construct.  And lo and behold, there was a sequence of moves where the planks could be assembled into a cubic box.  Awesome!

Plank Box is a great design and I thoroughly enjoyed the process of solving it!

Octamion

Octamion is a multi-challenge 2D assembly puzzle.  The objective is to make various shapes with the 8 pieces that are provided.  There 2 types of pieces with 4 of each.   Each of the types uses a different wood type to provide a nice contrast between them.  Of course, the pieces arrive nestled within one of those nice trays with a rotating clear acrylic cover.

In line with the name, the 8 pieces arrive in the form of a regular octagon.  The bottom of the tray has silhouettes of 7 additional shapes (for a total of, you guessed it, 8 shapes) that can be made.  I found them fairly simple to solve and consider this one more targeted to a new puzzler.

The back of the tray also suggests that you create your own new shapes.  I highly suggest doing this.  In fact, the shape identified as a diamond, I would consider a kite, and I created my own diamond shape for your pleasure.  If you create interesting new shapes, share it in a message below.  Or better yet – send it to Crafty Sunflower!

Diamond

Correct Order

And now to flip the final puzzle of the release open.  Wait a minute!  There’s a note indicating that a bolt needs to be removed first.  No problem – bolt removed.  It still doesn’t open!

Unlike the prior puzzles of this release, Correct Order doesn’t have a hinged cover that opens up.   This one is meant to stay closed with the entrapped pieces manipulated by techniques other than direct contact.

Behind the acrylic cover, you can see 9 square pieces with the digits 1 to 9 cut out in a 3x3 array with the digits arranged in reverse numerical order.  The digits are cut completely through the pieces so that they are highlighted by the red base of the tray.  The pieces are nice and thick to give them some mass as they move around in their trapped space.  The corners of the pieces are also rounded to keep them from binding as they slid past each other.  Beneath the matrix of digits is a 1x2 piece that is in the middle of the bottom row which arrives with a bolt through it to ensure that the puzzle arrives in the reverse order starting configuration.  Removing the bolt allows pieces to start moving and the fun to begin.

Correct Order adds an element of dexterity challenge to a sliding puzzle challenge.  It’s easy enough to slide an entire row or column but when you want to move part of a row or column, you need to get a bit more creative.  However, the techniques used to split rows and columns are a good skill to add to your puzzling toolbox for other puzzles that you will eventually encounter.  Using these techniques, I managed to put the digits in the correct order.

As I was going to release with this blog, I was suddenly struck with the uneasy feeling that I may have not solved this puzzle as intended.  What if the puzzle could be solved without splitting rows or columns.  Dropping a digit into the bottom right side pocket would force all the pieces to rotate clockwise until that digit was popped back out and another dropped into the left-side pocket forcing all the pieces to then rotate counter-clockwise.  The 5 in the center would never move.  Could these alternating right/left clockwise/counter-clockwise moves be used to reverse the digit order?  If so, this would be a much more elegant solution not requiring any dexterity techniques.

Unfortunately, I was unable to verify if this alternate approach produces a solution, in time for  this blog but I’ll consider this one unfinished for now until I give it some more thought.  If you have any insight into this, please add it the comments.

So I enjoyed solving this one and it may be even better than I initially thought.