Mixolometragrobology – Get in the Spirit!

Mixolometagrobologist Steve Canfield decided to go all out for his exchange puzzle in last year’s International Puzzle Party (IPP) and deliver a Sequential Discovery (SD) cocktail for us to savor.  After all, he was the host and wanted to make a big splash by leveraging his vast knowledege of puzzle Boxes and Booze to create an intoxicating journey with a bittersweet ending.  To aid him in this grand endeavor, he enticed puzzle genius and master craftsman Lee Krasnow to flesh out the intricate details that make this puzzle shine.

Get in the Spirit! consists of multiple layers of intrigue.  The outside is turned from aluminum with a Walnut and Hard Maple center ring to provide a classy classic look.  This shiny work of art may not look all that difficult but aluminum parts encapsulating various devious movements ring true.  After I solved it, I tested this in a manner that I’m sure will resonate with everyone.  I suspended both and struck them to verify the sonority of each.  Both produced a very nice tone with the top straining longer to sustain its note.

As for the goal, the shaker shaped tag simply said Get in the Spirit!  Preparing for just that, I happily embarked on my SD spiritual journey.  But where to start?  It’s a shaker!  You’re supposed to shake it, right?  Right?  Not so much.  Tilting and rotating will do.  As a matter of fact, I’d recommend not shaking it.

Through the holes in the top, you can just make out a red logo on a dark green background but don’t strain your eyes.  What could it be?

All three parts of the shaker seem to rotate freely and as you twist it and move it around you can hear things moving inside.  I was starting to fear that it might be one big marble maze and was particularly worried about the bottom portion.  I hear that people sometimes get lost in their cups.

With a little bit of exploration, the first move can be found, revealing the first glimpse of the interior.  I’m embarrassed to admit that this initial freebie move took me a full 10 minutes but I was going to savor this journey, by golly.  And with a little bit of additional work, the outer shell was peeled away to reveal … the next layer.

The interior is mostly 3D printed garnished with some metal hardware to facilitate making things more difficult.  Welcome to the inner circle, which sports 5 windows around it’s circumference.  And the inner circle has it’s own inner circle with it’s own set of windows.  It’s obvious that a lot of additional work went into making the design aesthetically pleasing instead of resulting in a strictly utilitarian design.  When the windows line up, you get a glimpse of what is waiting inside.  Through another opening, you can get a good look at a trapped coin although there doesn’t seem to be a way to easily remove it.  

Now you have a clear view of that red logo on top, which kind of looks like the top of a bottle.  With some effort you can get the top of the bottle to stick out.  It seems like it would make a great handle to rotate the bottle inside, which I did.  Rotating clockwise works great!  Rotating counter-clockwise not so much.  It really is a bottle and proceeded to dribble it’s contents in my lap.  I obviously don’t know how to hold my liquor.  At least I managed to limit the damage by quickly retightening it and vowing to never make such an obvious mistake again.

With just one drink under my belt, I stopped making progress.  I hit THE WALL!  At this point I kept trying everything over and over and getting nowhere.  There seemed to be a lot of enticing round holes that were trying to tell me something, but all I was getting was a buzz.  Eventually, I packed it back up and put it to the side for a while, a long while, months, in fact it’s been about a year.  How embarrassing!

After taking it back out after all that time, I blocked out a weekend and quickly (or at least quicker than the first time) found myself back at the wall.  After spending another considerable amount of time looking for a way forward, I finally succumbed and asked permission to do something that I was reluctant to do.  And I received the rare go ahead.  Usually this is followed by lots of laughter as I try it.  However, this time I was lucky.  In hindsight, the puzzle does provide a hint on how to get over that wall but like all good puzzles, you don’t recognize it until it’s already too late.

After a few more moves, you eventually end up with a token that is a bottle of your accomplishment.  Or is it a bottle that is a token of your accomplishment.  In any event, you wind up with both a token and a bottle of spirits.  If you are adventurous, you can take everything completely apart into the dozens of components that make Get in the Spirit!.  

The reset takes much longer than the solve but that’s basically because you just freed up a nice little bottle of spirits.

And that red logo on the dark green background?  Turns out it’s HUA for the H. Underberg-Albrecht company that Herbert Underberg started the day he married Katharina Albrecht to produce natural herb bitters.  

In addition to Get in the Spirit!, the puzzle, Steve also produced Get in the Spirit, the book.  The book provides a collection of fine cocktail recipes and wisdom.  Of course each recipe has a photo of the cocktail with an amazing garnish. 

It is also possible that Lee will make a companion cocktail shaker stand to hold both puzzle and book versions of Get in the Spirit!  Of course it will be a puzzle box and will utilize pieces from Get in the Spirit! in the solving process.  The CAD drawings look amazing and can be seen on Lee’s website, Pacific Puzzleworks.  However the fate of this project is still in flux as insufficient preorders didn’t provide the volume required for the originally projected price point.  Maybe offering an all 3D printed version of Get in the Spirit! for folks that don’t own one but would like the cocktail shaker stand could salvage the original plan.

Half A Dozen Rhombic Dodecahedrons - Cluster Buster

For puzzlers used to working with cubic dissections, it may be a bit daunting to be presented with a puzzle based on rhombic dodecahedrons.  Rhombic what?  To keep it simple, a rhombus is a diamond (all 4 sides of equal length), dodeca means 12, and hedron means a shape bounded by some number of planes.  So, a rhombic dodecahedron is basically a 12-sided object with diamond shaped sides.  The rhombic dodecahedron also has the nice property that if you have a lot of them (at least a cluster), they will pack together with no empty space between them.

Cluster Buster and Truncated Cluster Buster were designed by Stewart Coffin in 1973 and described in his book, Puzzle Craft, 1985.  Both consist of a cluster of 6 rhombic dodecahedrons that has been dissected into 6 identical pieces.  The truncated version has the 6 outer tips cut off to provide a square face on the outward facing side of each rhombic dodecahedron.  The difference between the two is cosmetic and both operate the same way.  The two objectives are to take it apart and to put it back together.  You might be thinking, Duh!, but these challenges are quite a bit different.

Cluster Buster has 1 sliding axis and you need to position your fingers in very precise positions to pull it apart.  This is more difficult than you would imagine with a well-made version of this puzzle.  There is an alternate method of disassembly, but I wouldn’t recommend it for a nice version of this puzzle.

Getting it back together is an entirely different matter.  It isn’t difficult to determine how the pieces should be oriented for reassembly but trying to hold 6 pieces with two hands makes this an interesting dexterity challenge.  In addition, the pieces have to be perfectly aligned to get them reassembled.  A lot of Coffin designs seem to have this theme.

My version of Truncated Cluster Buster is a 3D printed version from Pacific Puzzleworks that was a gift from John Rausch of Puzzle World.  For a 3D printed puzzle, this one is well made.  However, it is quite a bit easier in both the disassembly and assembly compared to a well-made version in wood.  The rounded edges of the pieces provide the ability to get a hold of the edges instead of having to only used the faces when puzzling it apart.  That combined with the frictionless surfaces of the PLA plastic allow the puzzle to be quickly disassembled.  Similarly, the rounded edges make assembly a bit easier since you don’t have to be as exact in aligning the pieces before putting them together. 

The 3D printed version is a very nice puzzle, but if you want the full experience, I recommend finding one of high quality made in wood to play with.  However, if you’re planning on buying one, a nice one made in wood is going to cost you a lot more than a 3D printed one.  The one from Pacific Puzzleworks is available on Etsy here.