Preserving a Legacy – No Problem Puzzles

Theo Geerinck and Symen Hovinga teamed up to become the prolific duo behind No Problem Puzzles.  They provided over 100 amazing puzzles designs for the community between November 2020 and April 2023.  Unfortunately, this came to a tragic end with the passing of Symen on 7 April 2023.

To keep the No Problem Puzzles legacy alive, Theo decided to graciously allow the puzzle designs to be made available to the puzzle community for anyone to print their own copy.  He enlisted the help of Mr BurrTools himself, Andreas Röver, to verify and publish the stl model files.  These are being available on the Printables site under the No Problem Puzzles collection. 

Andreas will be incrementally adding the puzzles to the library over the next several months.  The initial 3: Sandbox, Swinging Lid Tray, and 3U Frame are currently available (Update: 2 more were added before this post came out).

Since I had 3 puzzles at once to print, I printed all the frames together using gray filament and then a separate print of all the pieces using a light blue filament.  Both Sandbox and Swinging Lid Tray came out swinging right out of the gate.  U Frame took some extra work to get it ready.  Tight connectors had to be sanded and loose fittings had to be glued. 

All 3 of the initial puzzles released have a difficult rating of 3 out of 5 so none of them are difficult.  However they are all fun and I enjoyed solving each them.  I managed to keep myself from binging them all at the same time and did one a day.

Sandbox

The first puzzle that I wanted to dig into was Sandbox because it has such a cool looking box.  I still like it even after my NPSO asked Why can’t you make nice boxes like that?  Not only does this supreme box announce the name of the puzzle and designers on the front and sport a rock’n curved top featuring a negative handle, it also includes an image of someone shoveling a pile of sand.

In addition to the amazing box, the puzzle also consists of 4 pieces that need to be packed within said box.  Of course, you just know that the swinging lid is going to be a problem since the arc of the back of the lid sweeps through a portion of the interior.  And this is what makes the puzzle interesting and appealing.

All that is needed is to figure out how the pieces can go together, how they can be put together such that they can be inserted in the box, and finally how they can be put together such that they can be inserted in the box so that the lid can be closed.  You may be thinking why not just jump to the final stage and skip all those beginning steps?  Call me old fashioned (I prefer that to dim-witted) but I find that the initial baby steps help me get to the end.

Swinging Lid Tray

The second puzzle that I attacked also has a swinging lid.  In fact, it’s called Swinging Lid Tray and not because it parties with all the pieces although the lid does swing both ways.

Swinging Lid Tray is a 2D restricted-opening packing puzzle with the opening on the side guarded by a swinging door.  The pivoting axis of the door is neither on the end nor the middle so that the arc through the interior depends on which way your rotate it.  The top of the puzzle has a nice honeycomb pattern with sizable openings that allow you to manipulate the pieces within.  Of course my wife wanted to know why I didn’t print it in yellow and black and add pictures of bees on the pieces.  Sheesh!

I’m embarrassed to say the trying to add the first piece to the empty tray stumped me for a minute.  I made a careless assumption and was reminded once again to pay attention.  Once I got past that, it was clear sailing.

With these types of puzzles, it’s all about determining the last piece to insert and how it’s done.  For Swinging Lid Tray, the first part was not surprising but the second was unexpected.

3U Frame

I left 3U Frame for last because it looked more intimidating than the other 2.  However, it was no more difficult than the others.

3U Frame is an apparent cube packing puzzle with the objective to make a 3x3x3 cube from the 4 pieces within the center of the 5x5x5 frame.  The frame is made from the intersection of 3 U shapes.  The best part of this puzzle is that 3 of the pieces require rotations to add them to the frame.

Many thanks to Theo, Symen, Symen’s Family, Andreas, and to all the people that bought every one of the No Problem Puzzles as they came out to inspire No Problem Puzzles to keep making them!

RIP Symen!

Amazingly Non-Burrish – Gravitational Burr

Yes, yes, it looks like a burr but when you get into it you’ll start to realize the gravity of the situation – it’s amazingly non-burrish.  So if burrs aren’t your thing, don’t worry.  If you can pull the contents out of the belly of a crocodile, you can solve this one as well.

Gravitational Burr was designed by Junichi Yananose (Juno) from Pluredro and made using American Black Walnut.  It consists of 6 standard burr pieces that look like they have been made from wood infested by boring insects.  However, the boring traces were intentionally added to provide a path for a ball bearing to meander along a dynamically changing path.  

Since it arrives assembled, the first task is to take it apart.  Of course, all those boring paths are hidden and you have to blindly embark on this journey.  About halfway through, you can get a good look at the amazing interior and start to deduce what needs to occur to get to the finish line.  Unfortunately as I age, I find that my deducing is reducing.  But deducing I went as I tried to hold a dynamically rotating piston-driven image in my head.  Needless to say, there was a lot of backing up and restarting involved.  And lots of Oh, I’m back here again moments.

When I finally navigated the path to the end, I was super impressed that the ball bearing didn’t just come dropping out.  Juno designed it so that the ball bearing would be secure when it came to disassembling the pieces.  And this attention to detail is what makes Pluredro’s puzzles so special.

Once apart, you can get a good look at all the pieces to see exactly how they interact with each other.  You will also notice a compartment that could be used to store something inside. This internal space can be used to justify it as a puzzle box for those desperate collectors that only purchase puzzle boxes.  Or maybe as a poke to those that collect burrs and refuse to buy puzzle boxes.  I suspect that some people received it with a loaf of bread inside.  The puzzle description indicates that you can store the ball bearing in this cavity to inactivate the maze and reduce the number of moves from 56 to 2.  However, I wouldn’t recommend it since there is nothing to secure it and it will eventually fall out and roll into some dark and mysterious place where things go to never return.

Since this really isn’t a burr challenge, it’s not difficult to get the pieces back into the starting position for the return trip.  To get you started, 2 pieces have matching magnets to provide a nice tactile feel to the puzzle and the other pieces just seem to fall into place to provide the maze required for the ball bearing.  You just need to determine the order to add the pieces, which isn’t difficult.

Surprisingly, I found the reassembly more difficult than the disassembly.  Knowing and doing are really two different things.  Event though I had a mental image of the entire dynamic map, the blind traversal of the path took several tries before I had it back to the beginning.  Again, I was impressed with the design and how it avoided being reset at the mid-point.

More PPing in the Big Apple – NYPP 2025

The first PP of the year is always a welcome event. I always look forward to reuniting with the local puzzle community at the annual New York Puzzle Party (NYPP).  This year’s NYPP was held on 7 June 2025 and featured the usual mix of mingling with other puzzlers, attempting to solve puzzles, listening to prepared speeches, and the occasional puzzle selling/buying.  This year the event was also being filmed like last year’s International Puzzle Party (IPP) in support of a future documentary featuring the puzzle community.

It’s always nice to catch up with fellow puzzlers.  There were also a couple of new attendees from the Mechanical Puzzle Discord (MPD) that I enjoyed meeting in person.  And of course you can’t chat without working on a puzzle.  You know what they say about idle hands.

There were some very impressive puzzle collections brought by some of the participants and I had the opportunity to solve Free Me 7 by Joe Turner and Ring Case and Chubby Crocodile by Junichi Yananose (Juno) from Pluredro.  Despite the online warnings to be gentle to avoid scratching the puzzle, Chubby Crocodile had received some tough love prior to NYPP and had some pretty serious gouges to show for it.  It’s unfortunate that the pins used didn’t have rounded ends.  

There were more new and old Pluredro puzzles that were available to play with including Gentle Interlock, Grooved 6 Board Burr #7, Dial Case, Mittan, and Sequential Discovery Board Burred Box (SDBBB).  Other puzzles of note on the table to play with included The Louvre by Mr. Puzzle and Jack in the Box by Jesse Born.

Although I didn’t have enough time to play with it, there was also a Stickman Gordian Knot puzzle made by Lewis PD Puzzles using resin casting.

Haym Hirsh also brought along some of the Jigsaw puzzles that he has been working on including his exchange puzzle, Jigsaw 4, from the 41st International Puzzle Party (IPP) last year.  He had copies available for sale along with copies of his exchange puzzle from IPP40.

As usual, George Sicherman brought along some printed puzzles where the pieces could be cut-out to solve.  These included his Rock Garden symmetry puzzle with 4 pieces and his 2025 New Year’s Puzzle with 4 pieces that can be used to make various rectangles.  This puzzle is also still available in laser-cut acrylic from Nothing Yet Designs. 

In fine NYPP tradition, several attendees provided presentations.  This year’s talks included the following:

Snail Ball – Don: Since there were only 2 scheduled talks for this year’s event, it was suggested that participants could present their favorite puzzles either to the group or individually on camera to support the documentary being filmed.  Don took advantage of opening the discussions with a demonstration of the Snail Ball and a discussion of how it works.  It’s simply a ball that rolls down a ramp but it moves very, very, very slowly.  You just have to take his word for it that it’s moving.  This puzzle is available from Grand Illusions.  Don also demonstrated a keepsake box that could be used to store valuables.  I believe that he mentioned that is was an update to a version made on a lathe by a 10 year old boy.
 

Puzzle Video Games On Consoles (And Maybe PC, MAC, and Mobile) – Michael Cahill: This year, Mike gave an overview of a selection of video games and their objectives.  The presentation covered:

1. Puzzle Hybrid Games – Included Merge and Blade.
2. Puzzle Adventure Games – These included Scorn, Escape Academy, Case of the Golden Idol, Superliminal, Botany Manor, and Indian Jones and the Great Circle.
3. Lemmings, But in 3D – 2 games were covered of which I only caught the name of Humanity.
4. Deeper Dive Into Individual Puzzles – These included Arcade Paradise, Blue Prince, Balatro, and Chants of Sennaar.

 

BurrTools Tutorial – Haym Hirsh: Everybody who’s anybody in the puzzle community loves and uses BurrTools.  So Haym provided an overview and demonstration of it’s capabilities and how it can be used to solve and design puzzles for those who want to be in the who’s who of puzzledom or just brush up on functionality.  In fact, I learned that Source Forge has the 32 bit version and Git Hub has the 64 bit version.  The group also expressed gratitude to Andreas Röver for creating BurrTools and gifting it to the community 
 

City Challenge Puzzle – Joyce Michel:  During the gathering, Joyce distributed copies of the City Challenge that she developed.  It consists of challenges where you have to determine the city that is being referenced.  Each clue consists of a rhyme that identifies the city and each city contains the initials of the state where the city resides.  The example given is: This capital city’s a fine college town, The buildings are pretty and the Ivy is Brown.  The answer: Providence, RI.  The answers were reviewed at the end of her presentation and I believe that the collective group managed to solve each one.

Lights, Camera, Action !

Welcome To The Home Of Despair – DODECASOMA

What happens when you take a 3x3x3 matrix of cubes, attach identical pentahedrons to each side of the matrix so that each pentahedron completely covers one of the matrix sides, define a new cubic boundary to encompass the new shape, slice the space up into into 27 identical bits, and randomly glue up some of neighboring bits back together?  Well, you get a DODECASOMA obviously.  To save you the effort of doing that yourself, Rod Bogart has done it for you so that you can enjoy the formidable fiddly fun of constructing a dodecahedron from 7 dodecahedronized Soma pieces.

DODECASOMA was designed and made by Rod Bogart and used as his exchange puzzle for the 41st International Puzzle Party.  It consists of 7 green 3D printed Soma pieces that assemble into a dodecahedron instead of the normal cube.  The pieces are nicely scored with the outline of the 3x3x3 grid to provide some guidance on how the pieces are aligned.  The puzzle also comes with a stand for displaying the assembled puzzle.  The stand is also useful to hold partially assembled constructions.  And although it is providing a helping hand, don’t expect any useful advice from it.

It all appears innocuous enough but when someone hands you a puzzle that is an anagram for CASA DOOMED, you have to stop and consider the ramifications.  Are there 240 (or 480 – you’re welcome Nick) solutions?  No!  Which is good since you probably don’t need another regular Soma cube although you should have a least one.  Is the solution unique.  Don’t know!  But trying to solve it, it seemed like it could be.

Unlike a plain old boring Soma made from plain old cubes, the DODECASOMA ends up being made from 4 types of shapes which I’ve come to think of as corners, edges, middles, and the core.  They’re really misnomers, but I’m sure you’ll come up with better names when you start handling them.

I don’t know why I was surprised the first time I had 1 last piece to add and it didn’t fit.  Why would I think it would be any different from any other puzzle that I’ve solved?  A couple rounds of that wiped the smirk off my expectations.

It’s also a bit fiddly and you have to juggle the pieces in your hand as you try different piece combinations.  Unlike the typical Soma puzzle with cubic dissection pieces, not every piece will fit nicely anywhere.  However, there are enough places where they can go together making it non-trivial to solve.

Eventually I had it all together and with a bit more effort, I had it displayed on the stand.  At least I didn’t have to try all 10 sides to find one where it would stand without falling apart.