Playing – Ketchup

Haym Hirsh has been a prolific designer of 2D packing puzzles of late.  I suspect that he has 57 varieties by now.  I missed out on one of his recent puzzle designs when it first came out but I managed to snag a copy from Puzzle Paradise.  Now I’m playing Ketchup.  I wasn’t sure how well it would go in my collection but people tell me it goes with everything.

Ketchup is a 2D packing puzzle designed by Haym Hirsh and made by Nothing Yet Designs (NYD).  It consists of a red bottle-shaped tray with black highlights and 4 sets of white pieces consisting of a 5 and a 7.  The tray has a dedicated space to store one pair of 5 and 7s when not in the solved configuration.  The goal it to pack all 4 sets of pieces in the square section of the tray.

I anticipated solving this one quickly, but it made me wait until I fully explored it.  You notice early on that the square packing area seems one unit shy of making things easy, forcing you to attempt different ways of packing those 5s and 7s.  Although the 5s seem harder to pack, it’s always a 7 that you’re looking to place at the end.  In fact, it’s not all that difficult to pack everything except for a single 7.

And then to my horror, I saw it!  No, not the solution.  The fact that this is just another S&L puzzle!  (Nothing Yet Designs Release: 20 March 2025, 12:00 PM EDT)  Aghhhh!!!  Haym is just sneaking that S in as a 5 and the L in as a 7.  Will this turn out to be another crisis?

Crisis?

No.  No crisis here.  'Cause these are the good old days.  Where all the doubters are wrong, all the solvers are hard-working, and all the puzzles are above average.

It may have taken me a little bit of time but I managed to slip that last 7 into the tray.  All 4 sets of pieces where now nestled in the square area.  It was worth the wait.

And speaking of ketchup, the April release from NYD was yesterday with a couple of new designs and few restocks.  As mentioned in the last release post (Nothing Yet Designs Release: 20 March 2025, 12:00 PM EDT), this release was significantly scaled back as day-job requirements reduced production capacity at NYD.  However, NYD has just acquired another laser-cutter to widen the production pipeline a bit for future releases.

Nothing Yet Designs Release: 20 March 2025, 12:00 PM EDT

The next puzzle release from Nothing Yet Designs (NYD) will take place this coming Thursday, 20 March 2025 at 12:00 PM EDT.  Don’t forget to put it on your calendar and set your alarm.

I recently received a box full of puzzles nicely wrapped in NYD’s signature packaging.  Opening a box full of new puzzles never gets old.  This particular box contained the 14 puzzles for this month’s release featuring designs by Frederic Boucher, Stewart Coffin, Haym Hirsh, Nan Ma, Naoyuki Iwase (Osho), Gilles  Kutten, and Alexander Magyarics.  14 puzzles!  That’s a lot of puzzling!  But take advantage of it since NYD has announced that this will be the last big release for the foreseeable future.  Subsequent releases are anticipated to be much smaller.

Like the prior releases, this release consists of a variety of puzzle types and after having played with them for several days, it’s now time to share these puzzles with you.

Minima Dice – Frederic Boucher

Minima Dice was designed by Frederic Boucher and is this month’s puzzle from the Minima series.  It is made with a sparkly black 3D printed box with the name in gold and ….. wait for it ….. Dice!  I have to say that it’s a nice touch to use dice to make Minima Dice and the dice chosen look awesome!  NYD went all out to provide the nicest dice that I’ve seen for this puzzle.  The dice come in a variety of colors and they will be shipped randomly.


After marveling at the nice dice, you will notice that Minima Dice is sticking it’s tongue out at you and just daring you to put it back in it’s place.  This dice sticking out of the box is your clue that the puzzle is not solved.  When solved, all the dice are nicely packed inside.  The next thing that you’ll notice is that the dice sticking out doesn’t fall out because it appears to be stuck to the dice behind it.  After some experimenting, you discover that some of the dice have indeed been glued together and some of them can’t even be removed from the box.

With some dice in hand and others stuck in the box, you can see where the external ones would fit but it doesn’t quite seem possible to get them there.  And thus begins the journey.  The journey of nothing seems possible until all of a sudden you discover something and you start to move forward again.  After a few rounds of this, Minima Dice will not longer be sticking it’s tongue out at you and you’ll have a compliant and nicely packed box.

I have to stress that there is not reason to stress the pieces.  Everything move nicely without any force whatsoever.

Drop Out (STC202) – Stewart Coffin

NYD has received permission from Stewart Coffin to produce puzzles based on his designs.  I was always under the impression that Stewart’s designs were in the public domain but this turns out to be an untrue rumor that has spread throughout the puzzle community for decades.  It was disclosed in a recent Mechanical Puzzle Discord (MPD) discussion that it was verified with Stewart that this was indeed not true and permission needs to be granted to produce puzzles based on his designs.  Lucky for us, NYD has obtained permission to provide these classic gems.

Drop Out is a 2D sliding puzzle with a dark side.  It looks simple enough – a 4x3 closed top tray with 5 pieces trapped inside and one outside that can be added through a hole in the top.  The 5 trapped pieces consist of 1 square and 4 dominoes.  The free piece is a disk that we’ll call a puck.  The goal is to add the puck to the tray through the entrance hole in the top and manipulate it and the pieces until it ends up on the other side of the tray.  There is an exit hole on the bottom of the other side of the tray that will release the puck on arrival.

After demonstrating this remarkable feat of puzzle prowess to your friends, your next goal is to challenge them to solve the puzzle as well.  Sadly, they will not be able to repeat your amazing accomplishment, whereupon you can collect your winnings.

When Stewart Coffin initially developed this puzzle, he discovered that after the puck traversed the tray, the other pieces were left in a state that was unsolvable if you immediately put the puck back in at the starting point.  It takes a quick 8-move reset of the pieces to get them back into a solvable state or you could take the longer 26-move route and put the puck in through the bottom and reverse the path.  The move counts that I offer here are from Stewart’s Geometric Puzzle Design book as Ï’m not certain how sliding moves are counted.

Drop Out is made with exotic wood pieces and a laser-cut acrylic tray.  The tray is white with a clear acrylic top to track the movements inside.  There is also a finger hole in the center of the top to help manipulate the pieces in the tray.  I definitely made use of the finger hole as well as the entrance and exit holes to aid the movement or non-movement of pieces.  And it’s small size makes it easy to carry in your pocket so that you can take it with you to torment entertain your friends.

The Rattle – Stewart Coffin

I first encountered The Rattle in 2012 when I had the opportunity to buy one from Eric Fuller at the 32nd International Puzzle Party (IPP).  I enjoyed the puzzle immensely and am happy to see that NYD is now making it available for people in the puzzle community that have yet to experience it.

This classic 3D restricted opening packing puzzle was the genius of Stewart Coffin who conceived it decades before restricted opening packing puzzles became the rage.  The objective is to pack 8 pieces in a 4x4x2 box with a 1x2 opening.  To help get you going, 1 of the pieces is already in the box.  That is to say, it is not possible to remove the smallest piece from the box.  Hence the name – The Rattle.  Unless it was named after the frustration induced vigorous shaking you will inevitably succumb to.

The pieces are made from exotic woods and the box from clear frosted acrylic with the puzzle information debossed on the inside to keep the outside nice and smooth.  The tolerances are spot on and the pieces move very smoothly within the puzzle.  It initially looks intimidating with 8 pieces, but you quickly realize that none of the 7 free pieces can lay down on the job after entering the box and the trapped piece is just not a stand-up guy.  These restrictions limit the orientations of the pieces and make the solution very tractable.

The solution entails a sequence of inserting, moving, and rotating pieces to get them in position.  And yes, you will be rattling the puzzle to get those pieces in position since your only finger hole is the piece entrance.  Although it’s not a stated rule, try solving it without sticking your finger inside.

When you’re done and if you can get the pieces back out, try finding the other 5 solutions.  They are all closely related but 2 of them require a little more effort.  Rattle on!

Decoy – Stewart Coffin

The Decoy (STC 187A) is one of Stewart Coffin’s most difficult 2D restricted opening packing puzzles if not the most difficult.  NYD is now making this challenging puzzle available in laser-cut acrylic with a nice black tray and clear cover and light blue pieces.  The color contrast looks great!

I took a well disciplined approach to solving this one (after several undisciplined approaches of course).  On careful inspection, I discovered that there were 2 openings in the top of the frame.   After some deep analysis, I deduced that one can support adding 2 of the pieces and the other can support adding all of the pieces.  Some carefully executed experimentation revealed that one of the pieces is trouble with a capital T.  This piece just doesn’t want to be part of the solution.  It complains no matter where you try to put it.  And just when you think you’ve outsmarted it, it has the last laugh by getting in the way of all the other pieces.

After working on this puzzle for quite a while, I was beginning to wonder if the name was implying that it wasn’t really a solvable puzzle but just something to distract me from the real puzzles.

Eventually, I found an assembly where 3 pieces could be removed, but the other 3 were stuck.  But they were so tantalizingly close to being unstuckable!  Surely, this was due to a manufacturing glitch and not my superior solving prowess.  Stewart’s notes on this puzzle do indicate that the frame needs to be slightly oversized or the pieces rounded to support rotations.  His AP-ART compendium also has the solution but I refuse to look at solutions.  Of course I have a large backlog of unsolved puzzles as a result.

In the end, I discovered the secret to the secret sauce and was able to pack all the pieces in the frame.  And no, the secret is not to unscrew the cover.  It may look simple but it packs a really nice challenge.

Pac Men? – Naoyuki Iwase (Osho)

Last month’s release (Nothing Yet Designs Release: 7 February 2025, 12:00 PM EST) included some nice designs by Naoyuki Iwase (Osho) - Sliding Heart and Flying Heart.  This month’s release includes 3 packing puzzles designed by Osho.  The first of these, Pac Men?, is a 2D packing puzzle made from laser-cut acrylic.  It features a black tray with yellow pieces and matching yellow highlights.  The 7 pieces include: 2 happy Pac Men, one hungrier than the other, and 5 sets of conjoined twins.  Each twin is the result of a Pac Man that has another Pac Man attached on the bottom in all 5 possible rotations.  The goal is to pack all these Pac Men within a 2D tray.  This puzzle looks so amazing they should make a video game from it.

The goal is to have all the packed Pac Men facing up, or face down if you don’t want them staring at you as you push them around.  Why do these Pac Men only have eyes on one side of their heads?  It’s to force a single solution.  There are other solutions to be had if you ignore the eye orientation restriction.  Yes, you can easily turn over the symmetric pieces but you get the gist of it.   And no, I don’t know how many there are.  Could be dozens, could be 1.

It doesn’t take long to realize that this is not a trivial 2D packer.  I spent hours solving this one.  I ran across several promising configurations that only served to hinder progress.  Once you find a nice compact configuration of pieces, you are loathed to give it up.  Yet give it up I did.  Several times.  Not that I didn’t go back to them on occasion.  Eventually, I found myself on the right track and managed to swap and move pieces around to finally arrive at the destination with 12 packed eyes glaring at me.  And I have to admit, it is definitely not obvious and I can see why it is so difficult to find.  Once you’ve solved it yourself, just should spend some time analyzing the piece configurations to appreciate how well they divert you from finding the solution.  It’s really good.

While solving Pac Men? I was half expecting to end up in a situation that required me to flip over a piece to fill a spot to complete the packing but this never occurred.  So now I have left, the challenge of finding at least one mixed cyclopian solution.

Bast-Hedron 8 – Nan Ma

For this month’s release, we get to welcome another member to the Blast-Hedron (BH) family.  So far we’ve had BH4, BH6, and BH12.  And now we have BH8 from Nan Ma.  Like BH4, BH8 is a Coordinate Motion (CM) puzzle that forms a regular octahedron from identically shaped pieces.  However, BH8 consists of 8 pieces - twice the number of BH4.  And it forms a rather special regular octahedron.  Each piece is an equilateral triangle with a triangular window in the center and arms extending up from each of the three sides.  Don’t leave these laying around on the floor if you walk around without shoes in the house.

Each of the 8 triangular pieces forms one of the 8 sides of the octahedron and borders 3 other pieces.  And the arms extend through the octahedron to eventually become visible in the windows of the 3 neighboring pieces while displaying a portion of each of the 3 neighboring pieces in its own window.  

If you think that BH8 is more difficult than BH4 or BH6, you would be right.  If you think that BH8 is easier than BH12, there you would be wrong, very wrong, soooo wrong!  It may be easy to determine how the colors need to be arranged, but assembling this one is a real challenge!

The goal is to assemble the octahedron so that no adjacent triangles should be the same color.   BH8 was 3D printed using 4 colors providing 2 pieces with each color.  This results in an octahedron where each side shows all 4 colors, 1 for the triangular side and the other 3 for the neighboring arms that show in the center window.  However, if you manage to get it back together and find that the color scheme is a bit off, my guess is that you will eventually get used to it.

I struggled for a while trying to find the best way to juggle 8 pieces.  Add pieces individually?, in pairs?, by halves?…  The problem with this one is that BH8 seems to be very particular about getting all those points lined up just right before they allow the pieces to collapse inward.  I spent a considerable amount of time determining how all the pieces need to be aligned, which just highlights how difficult it is to get things together.  Luckily, when you get enough pieces together, even though it won’t collapse inward if things aren’t perfectly aligned, it does a good job of not collapsing outward either, allowing you to locate misalignments and adjust them.

This one’s my favorite from the BH family so far.  Complex, difficult, and attractive.

Pyramid In A Cage – Naoyuki Iwase (Osho)

Ah, this one brings back fond memories.  I think I had one of these when I was a little kid, but the goal was to put the pieces in the box instead of taking them out.  At least I think it was something like this.  Unlike the one I had as a kid, the shape inside doesn’t seem to match any of the openings.  Not a good sign.

Pyramid in a Cage is made with laser-cut matte black acrylic cage and contains a dark blue 3D printed pyramid.  This particular puzzle is not to make a pyramid but to free it from it’s cage.  Instead of being made with bars, this particular cage has some pretty large openings, 1 per side, and you need to determine which opening is suitable to pass the pyramid.  Let’s call them Hexagon, Phillips Screw Head, Ninja Star, Piece of Pie, Teardrop, and UFO.  Note that none of them is a triangle to match the profile of the pyramid.  To be clear, the pyramid is a regular tetrahedron.  And no, you can’t blast it out of there.

If the pyramid were outside the cage, you would be able to take it into a dark room and use a flashlight to see what types of profile shapes it would make in different orientations.  You could then use that information to match it to one of the opening shapes.  Or could you?

When it arrived, I decided that attempting to solve it by looking at the shapes without testing each one was the way to start on this one.  I even enticed my wife to join me so that we could each come up with our own guess and discuss the shapes.  We each provided our top 2 guesses and even overlapped on one of the shapes.  Thus we had 50% of the shapes covered.

Giving myself the best opportunity to gloat over the eventual win, we started with the one that only she picked.  Nope.  The one we both picked?  Nope.  Next up was my first choice and obvious winner.  Nope!  The next 2?  Nope, nope.  At this point we’d tried 5 of the 6!  It couldn’t be that last one!  Yup.  This one is really clever!  Not difficult to solve but well hidden and clever!

Best Friends – Frederic Boucher

Best Friends is a 2D packing puzzle designed by Frederic Boucher.  It was made from laser-cut acrylic with a green tray, black cats, and white dogs.  Each piece consists of a conjoined cat and dog.  The pieces consist of 9 paired best friends and 2 round treats.

The pieces only have faces debossed on one side so you don’t have to worry about which way to flip them.  And the pieces are thick giving them a very nice tactile feel.  They are a real pleasure to handle when solving this puzzle.

After working on Pac Men?, you just know this one’s going to be hard.  Are the pieces going to fight like cats and dogs?  Duhhhhh.  But even so, I didn’t find this one nearly as difficult as Pac Men?.  I found the solution rather quickly and attribute this to the fact that the tray is nearly completely filled making it easier to solve.  I say nearly since I don’t count the 2 spaces occupied by the treats since they can basically go anywhere or more specifically, in the 2 empty spaces after you’ve added all the friends.  Remember how we said that adding 2 single voxel pieces to Animals Party to fill the 2 empty spaces wouldn’t make it any easier to solve (Nothing Yet Designs Release: 7 February 2025, 12:00 PM EST).

This is a very friendly puzzle that looks amazing, feels amazing, and is a nice challenge that isn’t amazingly difficult to solve.

S&L Crisis – Haym Hirsh

Who knew that we would have an S&L Crisis so early in the new administration.  This particular crises comes to us thanks to Haym Hirsh.  Some puzzle are scary enough but with a name like S&L Crisis, that’s just over the top.

S&L Crisis is a 3D packing puzzle consisting of a green 3D printed stand and 6 dark brown 3D printed pieces that need to be packed within the stand.  Each of the pieces is identical, fits within a 3x3x5 space, and appears as an S when viewed along one axis and an L when viewed along another.  When packed, the pieces fit within a 5x5x5 space.  The stand has 3 sides of a 5x5x5 cube and stands (as stands do) on one corner to cradle the pieces.  There are also 4 fixed cubes in the bottom corner to force a single solution to the packing problem.

Looking at this puzzle, you just know it’s going to be easy!  Fairly simple looking pieces.  All identical.  Fits a cubic area.  Probably has a symmetric solution.  Nothing to worry about!  And that’s how I set myself up for my very own puzzle solving confidence crisis.  I couldn’t solve this simple looking puzzle!

Starting out rather cocky, I decided that I would simply take the 6 pieces and make a cube without the assistance of the stand.  In the back of my mind, I viewed the stand as a potential trap to lead novice puzzlers away from finding the solution.  So I set about to quickly make a cube, identify the holey corner, and place it in the stand.  What a great plan!  Except I couldn’t make a cube.  How embarrassing!

I spent a long time shuffling pieces around only to be astounded at how difficult it was to pack them together.  I was even starting to be happy when I achieved a 5 piece cube.  That 6th piece would just not go in.  And since they were all identical, it was hard to pin that culprit down.  They all seemed to be conspiring against me.

In the end, which really wasn’t the end, I finally had a 6 piece cube.  But none of the corners was holey enough.  It needed to be holier than holey and my temporary confidence boost completely deflated.  After several more attempts at this, I decided to go with clever rather than cocky and use the stand to develop a holey procession of pieces whereby I would build the cube around the required corner.  This is automatically supported by the 4 cubes fixed in the bottom of the stand.

And let me tell you about my success.  There was none!  Instead of creating incompatible cubes, I could only create cubes with 5 pieces in the stand (without having pieces stick out, which was beginning to look rather attractive by the way).  I created several 5 piece cubes in the stand, I shuffled pieces around, I attempted to switch to other corners, I prayed to the S&L, SAIF, and even the FDIC … all to no avail.

I was in full crisis mode!  And I was not about to admit defeat within the text accompanying the photos of this simple looking puzzle.  So I spent even more time on it but now have to call a cease fire and make a deal to blog about this one again once I solve it in order to get this blog out before the next NYD release.

This puzzle packs a tremendous ROI.  You should definitely put your money here!

J11GSAW – Haym Hirsh

Haym Hirsh has been on a tear with developing ever increasingly difficult Jigsaw Puzzles.  Eschewing the tedium of 1000+ piece jigsaw puzzles, Haym has taken to reducing these to less than a dozen pieces.  In fact, the first one I worked on consisted of only 4 pieces (All Corners, No Corners – 4-Piece Jigsaw).

This NYD release has Haym’s latest Jigsaw creation.  It’s called J11GSAW but it comes with 22 pieces.  What’s up with that?  What’s up is that it has 2 challenges supported by their own set of 11 pieces.  As with the prior Jigsaw puzzles, the pieces are squares with innies and outies added to give them a puzzly look.  Yes, believe it or not, innies and outies are technical jigsaw speak.  One set has these features located on the center of the edges and the other has them near the corners.  The puzzle is made with laser-cut acrylic with a white tray with blue highlights and one set of 11 red pieces and another set of 11 blue pieces.    

I should warn you that Haym has a black belt in packing packing geometric shapes and is the record holder for packing 19 equilateral triangles in the smallest possible circle.

After being beaten up on S&L Crisis, I approached J11GSAW with a bit of trepidation.  Unlike S&L, this one did not appear to be easy so I was hoping to be completely wrong again!  And I was.  While both the red and blue sets were solid challenges, I managed to solve them within a reasonable amount of time.

Is this just a square packing exercise?  Not at all!  Haym has taken it to the next level and jigsawed the design to nicely integrate these 2 aspects into a nice set of challenges.  They are both very well done!

Au Pays – Gilles Kutten

Recently, a new puzzle designer has popped up on the Mechanical Puzzle Discord with new 2D tray packing and symmetry puzzles.  His symmetry puzzles have quickly gone from first attempts to producing excellent designs in a matter of days.  The first of these refined designs by Gilles Kutten is Au Pays consisting of 4 dark blue laser-cut pieces based on a triangular grid.  As with most good symmetry puzzles, the pieces have similar characteristics allowing them to be put together in multiple ways without an obvious hint as to which ones may be correct.  You have to work for it.  It’s not overly difficult but a nice challenge and well done.  Worth getting if you like 2D Symmetry Puzzles.

Monster Eats Ducks – Gilles Kutten

The second 2D symmetry puzzle from Gilles Kutten in this release is a monster.  This one is really tough.

Monster Eats Ducks is made from orange laser-cut acrylic and consists of 4 pieces.  The pieces don’t look like they are very complex.  You can almost imagine that they were randomly created like duck sauce stains on a table cloth.  Playing around with the pieces demonstrates that they can interact with each other in any number of ways.  And therein lies the problem.   With so many ways that they can interact with each other, it is difficult to zoom in on the correct relationships.

After establishing how easy it was to connect pieces, I quickly determined that it was not as easy to get something that remotely looked like it would even pretend to be symmetric.  And as difficult as it was to initially find anything close to symmetric, after an extended period of time, I eventually found a couple of configurations that were indeed very close.  In fact at one point, I thought that I had solved it only to realize moments after announcing my triumph that it was just slightly off from being symmetric.  Slightly embarrassed, I had to do a take-back AHA (that’s AHA spelled backwards and pronounce with a descending tone instead of a rising one).

During my initial search for symmetry, there was a significant hint that I dutifully ignored for a long time.  However, I eventually caught on and began symmetricizing pieces in earnest.  And it still wasn’t easy.  I kept circling back around to the comfort of the close configurations.  After a protracted battle, the monster finally reared its ugly head, or maybe I should say its symmetrically appealing head, to celebrate the win.

This is an amazingly good puzzle from a new designer.  I highly recommend this one if you are interested in 2D symmetry puzzles.

Sharpened – Gilles Kutten

Not only is Gilles Kutten honing his skills but he is also sharpening the pieces.  The pieces of his third symmetry puzzle in this release have been sharpened and are rather pointy.

Sharpened is a 2D symmetry puzzle made from red laser-cut acrylic and consists of 5 pieces.  Although it has more pieces than Monster Eats Ducks, solving this puzzle is not nearly as difficult.  The final shape is far from obvious.  It always amazes me how the pieces of 2D symmetry puzzles can hide the final shape so well.  This one’s more fun than difficult.

Windy – Alexander Magyarics

NYD has produced several 2D symmetry puzzles designed by Alexander Magyarics and Windy is the latest entry in this collection.  Windy is made from dark blue laser-cut acrylic and consists of 3 pieces that together make a symmetric shape.  

Windy provides a perfect balance of being challenging while not appearing very complex.  I expected no less from an experienced symmetrologist like Alexander.  With only 3 pieces, you would think that you could try every possible combination of the pieces to quickly identify the solution, but this is not the case.

I find that my best strategy for solving symmetry puzzles is to use hindsight.  I came to this conclusion a long time ago when I realized that the solutions were obvious after I had solved them.  It’s a bit like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Puzzle where you know now that you don’t know the positions of the pieces and that you don’t know when you will know the positions of the pieces.

Being temporally challenged, I had to manually wade through all the events between initiating and completing the solution constantly moving against the wind.  And this puzzle is Windy!  After completing my go-to random try this and that method to filter out the easy challenges, I moved on to the more serious approach otherwise known as the slightly less random try this and that method.

Without spoiling anything, the pieces sport clues to be exploited although resolving the issues that they present seems to be difficult to accomplish.  I found myself going around in circles on this one before I finally constructed a symmetric shape.  It’s very tricky and I recommend adding it to your 2D symmetry puzzle collection.

You may also want to check out Alexander’s other 2D symmetry puzzles from NYD including Amoeba, Baikonur, DNA, Thin LiZZy, F Fort, Hangers, Three Keys, RMF, Half Correction, A Lady’s Mess, Tasmania, Talons, and Delta Force.

A Physical Manifestation Of An Ethereal Concept – T Pack

Haym Hirsh, a professor of computer science for 100100 years, presents us with the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework.  This educational model describes the intersections between technology, pedagogy, and content for the effective integration of technology within teaching.  It consists of 3 contextual knowledge categories: content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and technological knowledge, the 3 pairwise intersections of these categories, and the overall 3-way intersection representing the entire framework.  Realizing that such a conceptual frameworks would not capture much interest, Haym transformed this abstract concept into something more physical albeit somewhat still cerebral.  The framework has become a box frame, and the 3 knowledge categories and 3 pairwise intersections have each been embodied in a T.  He has anointed this physical construction with the name T Pack.  Note the introduction of the critical space to distance it from the original ethereal concept.

T Pack is a 3D apparent cube packing puzzle designed by Haym Hirsh and made by Wood Wonders.  It consists of 6 wood T-shaped pieces that need to be packed within a 3D printed box made with wood infused filament.  And the box has been specifically constructed so that each side presents a smooth 3D printed plate-side finish.

Each side of the box has a square opening in each corner except for 1 side that has a corner shifted to the middle of a side to merge with the adjacent corner.  The edge of the new opening has also been removed to provide a full 2x1 voxel opening for inserting and removing the Ts.  And even though you can’t pass the Ts through the square windows, they are large enough for the pieces to poke out of them.

The goal is to pack 6 Ts in a box.  What a great concept!  I’m quite partial to 6 T puzzles (Shhhh! She Just Turned – 6T and Not A Box For Tea, A – T-Box).

Since all the pieces are the same T shape,  you only need to investigate how that one piece can enter the box and how it can manipulated once inside.  After looking for possible 3x3x3 assemblies outside the box, it quickly becomes apparent that some of the pieces will need to be rotated.  And although there’s not a lot of room within the box, all those windows facilitate the rotation of pieces.

Since not all the voxels within the box will be occupied by the Ts, the first piece removed from the solved configuration does not necessarily need to come out in the first move.  In fact with all those windows, there could possibly be a lot of movement before the first piece comes out.  I focused on the removal of this first piece as a starting point of how the pieces would be configured.  Of course, I didn’t start with the correct way to remove this piece and spent quite a bit of time unnecessarily cajoling pieces into positions to no avail.

It’s always fun when you get half the pieces in, decide it’s not going to work, and then have to figure out how to get them back out for another think.  Sometimes its because I naively thought I could do something undoable or sometimes its because I simply lose my way.  I’ve recently noticed a strong correlation between puzzle experience and losing the thread of a solution.

After discovering an infinite number of ways that the Ts can’t be rotated within a partially filled box, I finally manged to get everything aligned and had an apparent cube of Ts within the box.  The solution entails a nice sequence of moves with rotations and I really enjoyed this one.  At the time of this posting, T Pack was still available at Wood Wonders.

All Corners, No Corners – 4 Piece Jigsaw

4 Piece Jigsaw was designed by Haym Hirsh and used as his International Puzzle Party (IPP) exchange puzzle for IPP41.  As indicated by the name, there are 4 jigsaw puzzle pieces that have to be placed in a square area.  Of course none of the pieces have a straight edge, making them all edge pieces without an edge or since there are only 4, all corner pieces without corners.

The puzzle was made by Nothing Yet Designs using laser-cut acrylic.  Going with the US based IPP red, white, and blue theme (as opposed to, for example, a bleu, blanc, rouge theme for France), the puzzle was made with a white frame and red and blue pieces.  The frame consists of 2 layers of acrylic that are bolted together with the bolt caps acting as tray legs.  Mine needed some tightening, so make sure you don’t unexpectedly loose yours.

Typical jigsaw solving starts with separating edge pieces from middle pieces and then pulling out the 4 corner pieces from the edge pieces.  With only 4 pieces, you would expect all the pieces to look like corners, but you realize that this will be a puzzle without a clean exterior edge.  All the pieces are middle pieces.  It’s kind of like asking for an Oreo cookie without the cookie part.  Admit it, you know you wanted to.  Just the middle please!

Each edge of the puzzle pieces has either a knob or a socket with each piece having 2 of each on opposite edges.  The knobs and sockets come in either single or double size and can be located in the left, right, or center position, or in the case of the double size, 2 adjacent positions, which always includes the center. And unlike a typical jigsaw puzzle, the pieces don’t have a designated top and bottom, so they can go either way.

The first stage of attacking this puzzle is to rule out some often-used packing tricks.  After getting those out of the way, you basically know how the pieces are going to be packed in the tray.  I was anticipating an expected Aha while pondering whether the Aha was that there wasn’t an Aha.  Trying both Aha and meta-Aha assemblies, I eventually found myself at the solution – Ahahaha!

Being a puzzle designer myself, after I solved the puzzle, just for the hell of it, for no particular reason at all, not that I would ever think about it myself, I checked the kerf angle of the pieces to determine if they were all aligned with the orientation of the solved puzzle and it looked to me like it was.  So don’t cheat and orient the pieces based on the kerf angle, not that you would ever think to do that.  This isn’t a real problem with laser-cut cut pieces like 4 Piece Jigsaw since you really have to go out of your way to determine which way the kerf angle is oriented, but it’s a huge problem if you 3D print the pieces where there is an obvious plate side and top side.

4 Piece Jigsaw is the first of a series of jigsaw puzzles designed by Haym and available at Nothing Yet Designs.  JIGS4W (all 4 pieces are the same color) appears to be the new name for 4 Piece Jigsaw and the next 2 in the series are JIG5AW (3 sets of 5 pieces) and J1GSAW (10 pieces).

Uniquely Sneaky Snakey Packer – Snake Pack

I recently wrote about Snake Pack 2, and now it’s time to talk about its Slytherin twin: Snake Pack.  They look similar but the snakes are the mirror image of each other.  Unfortunately, someone forgot to reverse the box and they are identical.  And therein lies the problem.  These new snakes just don’t feel like they belong with the same box.

Like Snake Pack 2, Snake Pack was designed by Haym Hirsh and made by Brian Menold at Wood Wonders.  The box that the snakes are packed into has an opening in the corner and 2 poke holes inviting your fingers to enter and manipulate the snakes.  Snake Pack 2 had 3 poke holes – I don’t know why one has 2 and the other 3.  It’s possible that one of the holes fell off during shipping since I did find a hole in the package.

The box is made from Moabi and the 5 identical “A” tetracube snakes that need to be coaxed into the box are made of Lacewood.  It’s still not Snakewood but it’s more snakey than the Snake Pack 2 pieces.  It also has a unique solution whereas Snake Pack 2 has 3.

For some reason, using the Snake Pack pieces feels more awkward than the Snake Pack 2 pieces.  Like Snake Pack 2, the Snake Pack pieces can enter the box in 2 different ways, which of course are different than the 2 orientations used by Snake Pack 2.  

The time required to solve Snake Pack was about the same as Snake Pack 2.  However, Snake Pack feels sneakier and the more difficult of the two.  Although the solution to each puzzle is completely different, I felt that the time spent solving Snake Pack 2 amped my snake packing factor to give me an additional boost.

As a last note, I’ve successfully packed all the snakes in the box but it didn’t make an apparent cube.  This was not stated as a requirement in the description and I assume that my solution is the goal, but if you know differently, please let me know.

Charming Snakes Into a Box – Snake Pack 2

I was fortunate to acquire Snake Pack and Snake Pack 2 from a generous soul on the Mechanical Puzzle Discord (thank you Mark).  To be honest, I approached these puzzles with a bit of trepidation.  I had heard that they were difficult and I was prepared to be assaulted by a variety of coordinate motion dexterity moves worthy of a modern dance performance.  There were even comments from frustrated puzzlers with pieces stuck in the box.  I decided to start with Snake Pack 2 since it was supposed to be the easier of the two (although Haym said that he found it more difficult).

Snake Pack 2 is a charming puzzle designed by Haym Hirsh and made by Brian Menold at Wood Wonders.  The box that the snakes are packed into has an opening in the corner and 3 poke holes inviting your fingers to enter and manipulate the snakes.  The box is made from Canarywood and is absolutely gorgeous!  The varying colors throughout the wood look fantastic!  The 5 identical “B” tetracube snakes that need to be charmed into the box are made of Moabi.  The Moabi looks great, but the poet in me cries for Snakewood – just because.

So what would I expect from a packing puzzle with 5 identical pieces.  The first couple of pieces have lots of room to rotate and could be put in any orientation needed.  The last piece will drop right in.  The next to last piece may require some shifting of the prior 3 to get in place and maybe even a rotation or two.  The third piece will be a pain – enough room to expect rotations and not enough room to accomplish them easily.

I worked with the snakes outside of the box to discover a workable assembly that could be inserted.  A little bit of experimentation shows that there are 2 ways that the snakes can be inserted through the box opening.  The major thought during this process was coming up with an assembly where the first snake could easily be removed from the box followed by a second.  To be honest, at one point I was stuck in a rut and turned the whole thing upside down so that the opening was on the bottom.  This helped me find what I was missing and led me to the solution.

In the end, I thought that the rotations were well behaved and I really enjoyed the puzzle.  And yes, determining what the third piece was and how to get it into place was the crux of the solution.  Once you figure it out, it’s not hard to do.

It turned out that this was an apparent cube puzzle as well.  However, there are supposedly other solutions and I don’t know whether this is the only apparent cube solution or one of many.

Petite Passel of Puzzles – 2D Packers

I recently received a passel of 2D packing puzzles from a very generous member on the Mechanical Puzzles Discord (MPD).  These puzzles make great fidget toys when on the phone.  On a recent call, I found that I went through 5 of them in rapid succession.  To be completely honest, I was pulling the ones that looked easiest while on the phone.  The days of deluding myself by thinking that I can focus on 2 things at the same time have passed.

The puzzles of the petite passel of 2D Packers described here have several things in common.  The goal is to place a set of pieces that lay flat within a frame with a restricted opening top.  They are made from layers of laser-cut acrylic and the frames are held together in the corners by metal hardware.  Each puzzle has its own unique set of identical pieces.  


Doheny

Doheny was designed by Haym Hirsh and made by NothingYetDesigns.  Of the petite passel, this one had the best construction with 2 layers of extra thick green acrylic topped with a thinner piece of clear acrylic.  The layers of acrylic are held together by hex socket bolts with capped hex nuts on the bottom to provide a nice set of legs that won’t scratch furniture.  Small washers are included both on top and bottom.  A slightly thicker washer is included between the clear and green acrylic layers to ensure that the pieces can move freely under the acrylic top once they are inserted.  The 6 pieces to be inserted were made with thick white acrylic to provide a nice contrast with the green frame.  I really like that the name, designer, and shop logo are engraved on the bottom of the clear acrylic.  I don’t know the genesis of the puzzle’s name, but I’m sure that there is a reason for it.  If you know or have a guess, you can include it in a comment.

At first glance, this puzzle looked like it would be the most difficult of the group and in fact it was, but none of these puzzles provided a difficult challenge.  Pretty soon after looking at the pieces and the space that they needed to occupy, I came up with a way to lay them out.  It was a simple matter to then insert the pieces.


C-It

C-It was designed by Haym Hirsh and made by NothingYetDesigns.  The construction is similar to Doheny except that the hardware is black instead of silver and the only washers used were the 4 for the layer spacing.  The top screws also have a lower profile.  C-It was made with a blue frame and black pieces with very little contrast between them.  The name for this puzzle is a bit more obvious than Doheny.  If you can’t see it, look at the pieces and the frame again.  The solve is straight-forward and due to the symmetry of the pieces you don’t even have to worry about putting them in upside-down.  This puzzle is still available at NothingYetDesigns for you to seize it.


Eloquint

Eloquint was designed by Haym Hirsh and made by NothingYetDesigns.  Unlike the prior 2 NothingYetDesigns puzzles, all 3 layers of the frame use thin red acrylic and the hex nuts on the bottom were open and not capped.  The pieces were in light blue.  The name of the puzzle and designer are engraved on the bottom without the NothingYetDesigns logo.

I solved this one and thought the solution was trivial.  So I did what any experienced puzzler would do and doubted that I solved it correctly.  Working at it a bit longer, I found a more complex solution (not to be confused with a complex solution) that I suspect is the intended solution.  The trivial solution resulted from the extra space introduced by the spacers, which allowed for unintended piece movements.  

My favorite part of this puzzle is the name and I find it a shame when I see descriptions of this puzzle referring to the 5 V pentominoe pieces.


Skinny and Fat Lightning?

Unfortunately, I received these puzzles second-hand and have no information on them including names, designers, creators, and shops.  How embarrassing!  My guess is that the information is the same for both since the construction looks similar.  The major difference between them is that one has a green frame with brown pieces and the other has a brown frame with blue pieces.  All of the frame layers use the same thin acrylic.  The tolerances on both were well done to allow the movements required to solve the puzzle.  The hardware used to fasten the frame layers used simple phillips head screws and hex nuts.  Unfortunately, some of the screws stick out on the bottom and have sharp edges that will scratch furniture if you’re not careful.  Unlike the NothingYetDesigns puzzles, spacer washers are placed between the 2 colored layers of acrylic instead of between the clear and colored layers of acrylic.  I noticed that this had the benefit of keeping dust and other particles from getting between the clear and colored layers.

It’s obvious that I took great liberties in providing names for this description.  My apologies to all parties concerned.  If you have any information on these puzzles, please post it in the comments.

Neither of these puzzles will stump you for long and they both provide a similar experience.  Lightning only strikes once and after you solve one, the other will lack the same impact.  If you get both, I would recommend avoiding solving them at the same time.

A Particlely Nice Puzzle - XI

How many XI particles can occupy a small planer space?  Well, that all depends on the spin and orientation of each XI particle.

XI is a restricted opening 2D packing puzzle designed by Haym Hirsh and made by NothingYetDesigns.  The 2 openings in the top permit the XI and anti-XI particles to be injected within the frame.   The anti-XI particles are simply XI particles with a 180 degree spin.  Although the 2 openings conspire to suggest that both XI and anti-XI particles should be injected, it is not obvious how many of each is required or even if both types are needed.  Even if each anti-XI particle cancels out a XI particle as they bounce around and collide with each other, the odd number of particles suggests that the solution will eventually end up as a XI or anti-XI puzzle.  I leave it up to you to find out which.

Needless to say, the particles need to be added in a specific order and potentially rotated as they are entangled.  It’s nice that the top is clear so that you can see what you are doing.  Of course, you have to perform all those particle movements and rotations using the 2 openings.  Fiddly, but not that difficult.  However, if you regularly refer to your digits as sausages, you may find the physics of manipulating small particles more of a challenge.

XI is made with laser cut acrylic and has a nice heft to it.  The use of washers to elevate the clear top ensures that the 5 particles move nicely within the frame.  The puzzle information engraved on the top is also well done and useful for distinguishing the puzzle from other restricted opening 2D packing puzzles by Haym from NothingYetDesigns.

Not A Box For Tea, A – T-Box

About the same time that I gave my wife her 6T birthday puzzle, I acquired a copy of T-Box, which, pointed out by my wife, also has six T-shaped pieces in a box.  T-Box was designed by Jenga master, Haym Hirsh and made by Mom – no, wait, I had it upside-down - made by Brian Menold at Wood Wonders.  This is the latest of Haym’s designs inspired by Jenga pieces.  For some, Jenga is a multi-player stacking game with wooden pieces, for others it is a source of raw materials for puzzle making.  Hopefully, we won’t see a massive run on Jenga blocks resulting in the worldwide shortages that we saw with tongue depressors (Chico Strikes Again – TD345).

Brian Menold turned the T-Box design into a stunning showpiece.  The pieces were upgraded to Birdseye Maple and the box was made from Bloodwood with a Maple Top.  What really makes this box stunning is the detailed laser engraving on the sides of the box.  Brian is fortunate to have a gifted graphics artist in the family and the design created for the T-Box really makes it something special.

Of course the goal is to get all 6 pieces within the box so that the top lays flush with the sides.  To help, or perhaps to hinder, there are a few impediments attached to the interior of the box.  Solving the puzzle is not that difficult, but it is a nice challenge.  When I was done, I noticed a nice property of the pieces, which can be exploited to solve the puzzle.  I’d like to say that, of course I recognized this property and summarily conquered the challenge in one swift stroke, but as usual, I crossed the finish line with a half-lit bulb.  Perhaps you’ll come across it and immediately recognize it for what it is.  And no, I’m not going to say what it is.

 

Puzzle Purchasing Pandemonium – Cluster & Inelegant Box

Puzzle madness has gripped the world!  A once humble community of puzzle enthusiasts has morphed into an insatiable world-wide puzzle-gobbling beast.  Reports of shopping cart thefts and shop crashing are now commonplace on puzzle messaging sites.

Puzzle demand now far outweighs the supply generated by a few key craftspersons around the world.  The entire internet can be felt sagging as puzzlers around the world refresh their screens multiple times per second in the anticipation of newly released puzzles.  Mom & Pop puzzle shops are collapsing under these loads forcing a migration to more sophisticated ecommerce website providers.

For the holiday season, Brian Menold at Wood Wonders decided to embrace this madness and held a special 24 hour “Snatch the Puzzle” event on Black Friday, 27 November 2020.  During the event, puzzles were randomly made available at deeply discounted prices as a way of saying thank you and providing some holiday fun for the puzzling community.  It consisted of puzzles from recent and future releases as well as some other goodies like puzzle stands.

However, Brian took pity on everyone.  To avoid having everyone repeatedly hit the refresh key for 24 hours (please don’t take this to mean that I don’t think there aren’t people up to such a challenge), he periodically posted clues via Facebook on 25 and 26 November 2020, providing hints at the times that he would be releasing puzzles:

• Will you be looking for puzzles in prime time, or when you're having a piece of pumpkin pie?
• I wonder if a label might come in handy?
• Let's start early. Same time forward or backwards.
• Is it a time or an airplane?
• There may be an emergency or two tomorrow!
• Why are those guys all sitting cross-legged on the floor on such a windy day?
• Another time, same backwards and forwards, and upside down.
• Police - Location (US)
• And finally, should I repeat myself?

Who couldn’t pass up an opportunity like that!  Like everyone else around the globe, I continually mashed the refresh key at what I hoped were the release times in an attempt to grab a puzzle.  Most of the time, I managed to get a puzzle in the cart, only to have it disappear before checking out.  The event was almost over before I managed to successfully acquire a puzzle.  When my wife asked me what I bought, I sheepishly looked at her and said “I have no idea.  If you have to look at it before you buy it, it will be gone.”  Of course, all of Brian’s works are wonderful and you really can’t go wrong.  Shortly after the event, I received a box from Wood Wonders with 2 puzzles.

Cluster

I initially had the opportunity to solve a copy of Cluster prototype that Brian brought to RPP last year (A Decade of Puzzling - RPP 2019) and was glad to finally acquire a copy.  The version that I received was made from Cambodian Ormosia.  It has an awesome grain looking like black bolts of lightning running through the wood.  It also has an interesting distinctive scent that reminded my wife of Sandalwood.  Cluster was designed by Andrew Crowell and it should come as no surprise that rotations are required to solve this puzzle.  In fact, all the pieces require rotations.  One of the pieces makes a rotational circuit through the puzzle, which I consider the highlight of the puzzle.  The puzzle is not very difficult, but the crystal shape requires some out-of-the-box-shape thinking.

Inelegant Box

Inelegant Box is my second acquisition from the Inelegant Puzzle series by Haym Hirsh made by Wood Wonders.  My first was Inelegant Fake (Not Your Elegant Hoffman Packing Puzzle - Inelegant Fake).  Like Fake, Box is made from 4x5x6 unit blocks that have been joined into 6 "L" shaped pieces consisting of 4 blocks each.  Since this consists of only 24 blocks, the completed cube is missing 3 blocks.  One of those blocks is the center of the cube making it hollow – aka a box.  This puzzle is not that difficult, but you do have to keep in mind that that there are missing blocks and you may have a difficult time solving this puzzle without that in mind.  The version I received from Brian was made with Canarywood and has a beautiful reddish grain to it.  It also came with a Curly Maple frame that shimmers as you tilt it.

Brian enjoyed providing this event to the puzzle community and is considering making this an annual event.  I’ve already started a finger training route in anticipation of next year’s event.  Thank you Brian for a fantastic time (12:21, 2:33,  3:14, 3:35, 4:06, 7:47,  9:11, 10:20, 11:11, AM/PM)!

Not Your Elegant Hoffman Packing Puzzle - Inelegant Fake

 

What happens when you dump a Hoffman Packing Puzzle into a mixing bowl, add some glue, and stir vigorously, losing some pieces in the process.  Well, you’d end up with glued bits that would certainly be less elegant than a Hoffman cube.  Even if it looked like a Hoffman Packing puzzle, it wouldn’t be genuine without all the pieces.  This, I suspect, was the genesis of the Inelegant Fake name.  However, it really is a misnomer since there is nothing inelegant about it.  It looks like a lot of care went into the design and construction beyond a mixing bowl.  I also doubt that anyone besides myself makes puzzles using a mixing bowl.

Inelegant Fake is the sixth puzzle in Haym Hirsh’s Inelegant Series, aka: Let’s Abuse The Hoffman Packing Puzzle Line.  Prior puzzles in the series include Inelegant Soma, Inelegant Box, Inelegant Cube, Inelegant Snakes, and Hoffman JR.  Before you get all worked up about the name of that last one, it was originally named Inelegant 5x5 before the marketing department got ahold of it.  I have it on good authority that the puzzle design reviewer insisted that his initials be added to the end of the name to memorialize his contribution.  {Of course, if you know enough to recognize who this is, you also know it couldn’t be further from the truth.}

Inelegant Fake was one of the many beautiful puzzles available in the last Wood Wonders release from Brian Menold.  The pieces are made from a variety of exotic woods and a frame is included to display the solved puzzle.  The frame is also very handy for holding the cubes as you assemble the puzzle.

Each of the pieces is made by joining 3 or 4 smaller bits together.  You’ll notice that there is not a single 2-bit piece in the bunch.  Adhering to the Hoffman Packing Puzzle design, each of those bits is an identically sized cuboid where the length, width, and height are all different.  

In complete opposition to the Soma cube, Inelegant Fake has 6 pieces with 3 bits and 1 with 4 bits.  Doing some extraordinary complex math and rounding off wherever possible, I deduced that the puzzle consisted of 21.3 22 bits.  Since the Hoffman Packing Puzzle consists of 27 bits, roughly 5 bits escaped the mixing bowl.  So, this raises quite a few questions of how those missing bits are being utilized to frustrate the puzzler.  In fact, so many questions were raised that I started to call it the IF puzzle.  If I assume that the missing bits were here, I could…  If the 4-bit piece were located there, I could …  If the designer were as evil as Kevin claims I am, he would have …

It turns out that Haym is not that evil.  The missing bits were exactly where I initially assumed they would be and so was the 4-bit piece.  Armed with prior Hoffman Packing experience and the fact that my initial assumptions were correct, I was able to produce a nice inelegant fake cube for display within the stand.  Now, the only question is, what other 3x3x3 construction should become an inelegant puzzle?