No Force Required – Gentle Interlock

It’s the season.  If you’re from Jersey, juno what I’m talkin bout.  And puzzlers will soon be reaping their own bountiful harvest of packages brimming with wonderful new acquisitions.  Last week was the momentous conjunction of events in the puzzleverse – Baxterweb, Cubicdissection Marketplace, Puzzle Paradise, and Mega Free Giveaways on the Mechanical Puzzle Discord (MPD).

The free giveaways on MPD have taken a life of their own and provide a means of repurposing homemade personal use copies of puzzles that would be impolite to sell.  Many are 3D printed and there has recently been a wave of some realized via LEGO.

Today’s puzzle is Gentle Interlock designed by Junichi Yananose from Pluredro.  Junichi has many more buyers than puzzles, resulting in his puzzles selling out in minutes or even seconds when they are released.  And he rarely has a second release of a puzzle since he is always working on the next design.  So he does his best at discouraging people from buying his puzzles.  In the case of Gentle Interlock, although there were prototypes of level 10 and 11, Junichi opted for the design with the lowest level - 6.  In his defense, he opted for this design stating that it had better playability.  As brilliant as all Junichi’s designs are, I took a gentle pass.

Fast forward to this year’s New York Puzzle Party (More PPing in the Big Apple – NYPP 2025)  where someone brought a copy of Gentle Interlock that gently tickled my brain and reminded me of this puzzle and how much I like burrs.  With that thought worming it’s way through my wormy mind, I eventually got around to pulling one from the replicator.

Gentle Interlock initially looks like a typical 6 piece burr but on closer inspection one end of each piece appears to be twice as large as expected.  This pushes the pieces away from the center thus providing more space to add bits where the sun don’t shine.  It also adds a nice bit of confusion since it orients what you may consider the center-facing side of the piece towards the side or even away from the center.

Since this puzzle was extracted from the replicator, it arrived unassembled.  Perfect!  The assembly is not trivial and it took me some time to work out where all the pieces needed to go and then how to assemble them.  Junichi certainly hit the playability goal he was aiming for.  However, I’m left wondering what the higher level designs would have been like.

Gentle Interlock was a fun puzzle and maybe one day, it will end up in a free bundle on MPD.

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.

Puzz L - Strugg L

I always enjoy playing with puzzles designed by Junichi Yananose and I was especially attracted to Strugg L with it’s spikey pieces comprising a prickly packing puzzle.  As a bonus, it also had a cool name.

The Strugg L pieces are made from Fijian Mahogany with bamboo pins and the frame is made from American Rock Maple.  The pieces, as well as the frame, have grooves for the pins to traverse, thus restricting their movement.

Although the description on the Pluredro site indicated that the puzzle was sold disassembled, shortly after the release, messages started popping up on the Mechanical Puzzle Discord server saying that they were being received assembled.  Sure enough, when I received mine, it was assembled as well.  Too bad!  I think that disassembled would have been the way to go for this one.

Using my super power of instantly forgetting puzzle solutions and piece movements, I quickly took it apart and was pleased to discover that it had now arrived disassembled (surely a Memento moment).
 
The objective, of course, is to make a 3x3x2 assembly with the 6 spikey pieces.  Some of the pins will need to face inward to interact with the other pieces and some will need to face outward to interact with the box.  Although you may think that rotations with the pins would be required to solve the puzzle, the description indicates that the goal is to use only rectilinear moves and that any rotations would only be short-cutting the solution.  It warns that this occurs about 20 moves into removing the first piece and indeed, at that point it is obvious that pieces can be rotated out.  However, it is definitely worthwhile to stick with the rectilinear movements to enjoy the full experience.  If you’re not taking the rotational shortcuts, it also adds a little more effort to remove or insert the remaining pieces.

Although cool, the name isn’t really indicative of the difficulty level.  Strugg L may look intimidating with all those spikes, but I found it to be very manageable in one sitting.  However, I must admit to retaining some residual memory concerning the single hole in the frame, which may have (or may not have) contributed to my quick success.  

Although I was hoping to strugg l a bit more on this puzzle, I thoroughly enjoyed it and look forward to similar (and slightly more difficult) puzzles of this type.

Tooling Around With Puzzles - Sequential Discovery Cubic Box

Once again, Pluredro has released a sequential discovery (SD) puzzle that sold out in minutes – 140 in 4 minutes to be exact.  This provides all the background you need to understand that Junichi (Juno) Yananose’s puzzles are well appreciated and coveted.

When the Sequential Discovery Cubic Box (SDCB) arrived, it looked like a nice 3x3x3 burr puzzle made from Fijian Mahogany.  It also comes with a nice Spotted Gum stand.  A little shake dispels that concept and gives you the first hint of other things waiting to be discovered inside.

Since spoilers of any kind are deeply frowned upon for SD puzzles, they can only be described in the vaguest of terms.  So the first move is cool!  I wish that I could say that it was the result of some brilliant thinking on my part, but like a lot of things in my life, it just happened.  But it’s so cool!  At this point you find yourself committed to the journey since there is no obvious immediate way to reset the first move.

The second move reveals that this is indeed an SD puzzle and not a simple 3x3x3 Burr.  Several secreted caches of tools, compartments, and receptacles are revealed.  However, most of it is just a tease, since they all seem to be safely nestled in their beds without an obvious way to release them.

Although there are several steps that comprise the solution, you’re never really in danger of not knowing what the next step is.  The path is well defined, mostly linear, and focused more on fun than difficulty.  So how do you know when you’ve completed the journey?  It’s over when you finally find Juno’s stamp – or I should say that this is the beginning of the reset process.  Resetting the puzzle is straight-forward, including the first step, which is especially fun.

I didn’t treat solving the puzzle as a race and took my time enjoying and understanding how each step worked.  Juno employed a lot of nice mechanisms in the design and its worthwhile spending some time to appreciate them.  There was one move that I’m sure has a more elegant procedure than the one that I used.  I searched for an alternative after solving the puzzle but was unable to find one.  Everything else was so well thought out that I’m convinced that I’m missing some subtle nuance of the step.  I’m looking forward to getting confirmation on that step someday.

It’s a Feature – Inaccurate Burr

What happens after you’ve completed 336 burr puzzle pieces only to realize that you’ve completely flubbed the measurements for the cuts – You call it a feature and charge extra!

Pure marketing genius!  And Eric Fuller is that marketing genius behind Cubicdissection’s branding drive.  Pavlov would be proud to see the puzzling masses salivating over the sight of cardboard boxes secured with orange tape.

When Inaccurate Burr was released in 2016, acquiring a copy was a no-brainer.  What’s not to like?  Designed by Junichi Yananose, make by Eric Fuller at Cubicdissection, and Oh, that beautiful Marblewood!

As per my wont, I quickly disassembled the burr without paying too much attention so that I could attack it as an assembly process.  Only when I had it apart did I realize that I was a tad impetuous and should have looked at it first to see why it was called Inaccurate Burr.  I’d like to be able to say that this is a rare occurrence, but it seems to occur often.  My favorite is pulling out pieces of a puzzle that I had disassembled years ago with no idea what puzzle it is or what shape it’s supposed to make.  And of course, the ultimate experience is when you acquire pieces of a puzzle with unknown origins.  Some puzzlers even have their friends disassemble multiple puzzles and mix the pieces to provide the penultimate solving experience transcending the normal single puzzle experience, which as you already know, is quite powerful.

After my initial, what is it supposed to look like? panic, I started to look at the pieces.  Two pieces immediately stood out.  Instead of having cuts that were half way through the pieces, one had cuts two-thirds deep and the other one-third deep.  The natural assumption would be that these two pieces make one of the three pairs of the 6-piece burr and that this offset led to the name’s genesis.

With the first pair is established, it is a fairly logical progression to add the others.  One piece of the pair has a knob that sticks out one-third and one of the remaining four pieces has a notch one-third deep.  Three pieces down!  Another piece can’t go anywhere except to be the third piece’s mate.  Four pieces down!  For the last pair, you would be forgiven if you tried to put them in backwards.  It looks like either way may work, but if you pick the wrong one, you will hopefully, quickly realize and rectify the incorrect positioning.  Once you get it correct, it ONLY takes 9 moves to insert that last piece and get the puzzle into its final inaccurate shape.

This puzzle may not be difficult but it is nice addition to a 6-piece burr collection and looks awesome in Marblewood.