Puzzling Preparation Purgatory – Helical Bits and Pieces

I recently had the opportunity to acquire some nice helical puzzles from one of the Two Brass Monkeys.  I’ve been eyeing these types of puzzles for years and finally acquired some when a set became available on Puzzle Paradise.  Included in the set were: HeLLical Burr, Oliver Twist, Twiddle Dee, Twiddle Dum, and Dodekastar (improved).  The first 4 were designed by Derek Bosch and are from his line of helical burrs, which he has been expanding over many years.  Although Dodekastar is not a helical burr, it is a great puzzle designed by Yavuz Demirhan and tweaked by the Two Brass Monkeys to be more difficult.  A nice little additional fidget puzzle was also included, which was the only puzzle to arrive already disassembled.

Puzzles arriving in their solved state is a sin and need to be disassembled into purgatory before being redeemed into a solved state.  Although a sinful puzzle and one that has been redeemed share the same outward appearance, deep down, you know the difference.  Every serious puzzle collector is able to scan their collection and weigh their sins against redemption.

Having received this batch of sinful puzzles, I quickly (or not so quickly) banished the puzzles to purgatory (a nice looking decorative bowl) for all eternity (the average amount of time it takes me to get around to solving puzzles).  Most were straight-forward, but one of the Twiddle twins (I really don’t know which is which), was a bit of a challenge.  I was also surprised to find out that Dodekastar was a challenge to take apart as well.  A lot of movement, but no obvious exit point.

Stay tuned for further updates on these puzzles as they are redeemed and take on their divine forms.

Starting With The Seed Of An Idea - Begonia

Back in 2012, when puzzlers were puzzlers and packing puzzles were packing puzzles and not those new-fangled hoity-toity 3-piece pack jobs where you have to rotate your piece where the sun don’t shine, a seed of an idea bloomed in the corner of Yavuz Demirhan’s mind.  This seed eventually grew into our 3 dimensional reality with 3 petals.  Each 4x4 petal occupied its own plane of existence except for where the planes met.  Yavuz divided the 3 petals into 8 pieces, 4 planer and 4 non-planer, and left only the seed in place within the frame of reference.  He named his creation, Begonia.  And it was good!

Cubicdissection released Begonia in 2013 and did an excellent job in making these puzzles from Walnut and Rosewood.  The Walnut frame is solidly built and has the same thickness as the Rosewood pieces.  It also has Rosewood splines that add a nice touch.  However, the splines are very subtle and tend to blend in with the rest of the frame depending on the lighting.  All the external edges of the frame are slightly beveled to give them a nice feel.  All the pieces are beveled as well and move nicely within the frame, which is very important if you end up moving them for hours like I did.

The objective of Begonia is to fill the 36 empty spaces within the open frame with the 8 pieces comprised of 36 cubies.  This is easier said than done.  I found myself doing the same things over and over while trying to avoid performing a completely boring brute force search.  I compromised and selected one of the planer pieces to always start with and checking all the ways that it could lie within the plane.  There are 2 main facts that I used to recognize futile attempts.  The 4 non-planer pieces have to be placed where the planes meet and the 3 empty spaces furthest from the inner corner have to be occupied by planer pieces.

I wish I could say that I used some brilliant deductive reasoning to discover the solution to this puzzle, but that’s just wishful thinking.  If the objective was to put 7 pieces in and have the remaining space match one of the already placed pieces instead of the 8th one I was holding, I think I found all of those solutions.

What makes Begonia so difficult is that there is a single solution and many ways to insert 7 pieces without getting the last one in.  Just for fun, I plugged it into BurrTools and found that there are 50,023 ways to put in 7 pieces without getting the last one in.  That made me feel a little better that it ONLY took me a couple of days to find the solution.

If you find yourself getting frustrated while trying to find the solution to Begonia, you could always back off and find one of the 2811 ways to build a 3x3x4 rectangular parallelepiped.  It’s much easier.  You may even be tempted to find all 2811 solutions before finding the sole solution to Begonia.

For the record, I do like those new-fangled hoity-toity 3-piece pack jobs and I’ve enjoyed solving many of them over the years.

A Pox On You - Pox Box

What better time to pull out and play with the Pox Box than during a pandemic.  Why not open up a box with such a label?  How much worse can it get?  Pandora would be proud.

Maybe the word pox has some benign meaning that I’m not familiar with and to be fair, I decided to look it up.  I found 2 definitions for pox in the Mirriam-Webster dictionary: 1) A virus disease characterized by pustules or eruptions, and 2) A disastrous evil: plague, curse.  I’m not sure which of these 2 lovely definitions inspired the name of this puzzle, but it didn’t seem to be as bad as the name implied.

Pox Box Piece on
Top of Pox Box Box

Contrary to what you would think from the name, this beautiful puzzle is fairly innocuous.  It was designed by Yavuz Demirhan and made by Cubicdissection.  It consists of a box made from heavily pockmarked Birdseye Maple and 4 Sapele pieces that erupt like pustules from the face of the box (work with me here, I’m really trying to justify the name of this puzzle).  The Birdseye maple used for this puzzle is spectacular.  The splines that were added around the box are very nicely implemented using concave rounded bottoms.  The extra work done to add a veneered piece of wood to the tops of the pieces looks fantastic.  It hides the joinery that is normally visible on these types of pieces.

Yes, it’s a puzzle with a box and even has box in the name.  No, it’s not a puzzle box.  It’s a packing puzzle, so the objective is the remove the pieces and put them back in.  Although Pox Box has a level of 7.14.7, it is not difficult.  You’ll notice that as you take the pieces out, they all have the same shape.  That certainly makes things easier.  Not only that, but you will quickly realize that the pieces can only reside in the box in one orientation.  Wow!  The only thing that you have to do is find the order to put the pieces into place.

When the box is finally empty, you can see that there is a shape glued to each side of the box to frustrate the movement of the pieces.  I’ll refer to them as frustrations.  You will notice that they are securely glued to the inside of the box and you can’t take them with you.

In less than 2 minutes of fiddling, I had all 4 pieces in, except one of the pieces was slightly off and couldn’t be put in place.  It may look close to solved, but it’s not.  I took all the pieces out and then experimented with how each would be able to move given the frustrations and how the other pieces would block movements.  After a reasonably quick analysis, it was fairly simple to get them back into their proper locations.

If you are new to this type of puzzle and want to give one a try, this is a great one to start with.  Don’t let the name scare you off.