MagicPuzzles.org

I got the following two puzzles on loan from Robert Yarger, one of the puzzle designer/makers of Cubic Dissection.

Oskar's Matchboxes

This is a 5 piece interlocking puzzle.  It was conceived by famed designer Oskar Van Deventer.  While normally made out of 5 actual matchboxes, this version was made from wood by Cubic Dissection member Eric Fuller.

Stickman Snowflake

This is Stickman puzzle box #9, the snowflake.  All the Stickman puzzles are designed and made by Robert Yarger.  This particular one was made later by John Devost, another member of Cubic Dissection.  The pieces are made out of multiple pieces of wood, rather than a single piece of wood colored white, as in the original Yarger version.  It is a very clever little puzzle box.  After it’s opened, it can be completely disassembled into 6 pieces.

Both puzzles were very clever.  I was able to open and close each in about 5 minutes.  I didn’t fully disassemble the snowflake box.  Since I only have these for a short time, I was relieved when I was finally able to get each puzzle back together.  The solutions are complex enough that I was not able to memorize them while opening and closing them.

The Stickman puzzle box brings up an interesting point about the economics of limited-edition puzzles.  Yarger originally made a number of these as Christmas presents for family and friends.  When they sold commercially on the Cubic Dissection site in 2005, they went for $35 each.  One went for $365 on auction in 2007.

Puzzle Boxes at Cubic Dissection often sell for $400-$500.  They are usually original creations of Robert Yarger or Eric Fuller.  Yarger grosses about $26K a year.  That’s one of the most talented guys in the business working 70 hours a week to make original creations.  Even so, the boxes are too expensive for most puzzle enthusiasts to get a copy.  The problem is basically because each creator makes about 30-40 copies.  It’s too tedious to make more, and they have not been able to find a manufacturer to make high quality copies at a lower cost.

Click here for a more extensive discussion at the excellent Cubic Dissection forum.

I mentioned the IRMO box from Cubic Dissection in my last post.  Here it is:

Eric Fuller "IRMO box"

This box, which I purchased in Feb 2008 from Cubic Dissection, is one of my few expensive limited edition boxes.  It had a limited production run of 45 copies.  It tied for first prize with 2 other puzzles in the 2008 International Puzzle Party puzzle design contest (though there was also a grand prize).  Surprisingly, though the mechanism is unique (Fuller confirmed this with Jerry Slocum), I found it relatively easy to open.

Eric Fuller runs Cubic Dissection.  It is, as far as I can tell, the #1 place in America to purchase collector-quality mechanical puzzles.   Most of the puzzles are made in extremely limited quantities of around 30-40 pieces.  The puzzles definitely are not cheap, but each is a work of art.

Cubic Dissection sells work made primarily by Eric Fuller (boxes and burrs), Robert Yarger (the famous “Stickman” series of boxes).  Both have given up more lucrative careers to pursue puzzle-making full time.  Some of Eric’s puzzles have been designed by other notable puzzle designers, and he obtains their permission to make and sell copies.  I assume at least some of the designers get a cut of the profits.  It also features the work of Mark McCallum, Scott Peterson, Fritz Hoddick, Kerry Verne, Michael Toulouzas.  Recently, they have also carried some designs by William Waite, as well as the All Five Puzzle.

Since Cubic Dissection is pretty much run by Fuller, it has excellent customer service.  About 9 months or so after buying the IRMO box, I tried to show it to a friend, but couldn’t get it open.  Eventually my wife was able to open it.  I contacted Fuller, who made a few suggestions.  When that didn’t work, he had me ship it back to him.  He fixed the problem very quickly, and insisted on covering the cost I spent to ship it to him.  So when I got it back, I found he had thrown in a free Cartesian wallet:

Cartesian Wallet

This is a piece of leather that can be used to carry credit cards around in.  It unfolds like so:

Cartesian wallet - unfolded

The puzzle, of course, is to reassemble it.  It’s one of my favorite puzzles because it looks simple, but it’s actually not.  It’s not something that will keeped you stumped and frustrated for days either.  It’s also very durable by its nature.  All these aspects make it a perfect puzzle to hand out to friends in casual situations.

I got some into Fuller’s passion for puzzles recently.  I told him that I avoided interlocking burrs because I thought they were too difficult.  This was based on my experience with Triple Cross, which is a 6-piece burr I got for Christmas near the start of my puzzle collecting:

Triple Cross

I got frustrated and looked at the instructions.  I still couldn’t get it!  My wife was able to interpret the instructions and reassembled it.

I mentioned this to Fuller while I was phoning him about a Cubic Dissection auction.  He agreed that some burrs were incredibly difficult.  What he recommended was getting an Ultimate Burr Set.  This is a set of 27 different pieces from which you can assemble over 60 burrs.

After doing about 100 of these, he said, your spatial sense gets so good that you can just look at the pieces and assemble the burr in about 20 seconds.  That’s why Eric Fuller is a world-class puzzle maker, and I’m just a modest collector.

Here are a few miscellaneous mechanical puzzles

This is DinoTry by William Waite.  This was a limited production run, so they are no longer available from Waite.  I believe Waite used this puzzle for the International Puzzle Party’s puzzle exchange.  To participate in the puzzle exchange, you have to make about 100 copies of your puzzle.  In exchange, you get 100 different puzzles back.

The International Puzzle Party is a by-invitation party of puzzle enthusiasts that grew out of house parties held by Jerry Slocum.  I believe Slocum has the largest collection of mechanical puzzles in the world.  If it’s not the biggest, it’s certainly one of the biggest, with over 30,000 puzzles.  By contrast, I have a little over 100 mechanical puzzles.  I was fortunate enough to get an invite to this year’s party after submitting my application to Slocum.

The object is to form a dinosaur out of the 4 pieces.   The site explained that this was an extremely difficult puzzle requiring lateral thinking.  I figured, hey, it’s only 4 pieces, how hard can it be?

The answer, it turns out, is really hard.  I emailed Waite my solution attempts.  They were both wrong, but he was kind enough to indicate the correct solutions.

This is DemonDino.  It’s a similar puzzle, also by William Waite.  Again, I was not able to solve it correctly.

This is the one piece packing puzzle.  It won the “Puzzler’s Award” (basically, the People’s Choice) at the 2001 International Puzzle Party.  It was made for a while by Bits and Pieces.  The version I have was made last year by Eric Fuller of Cubic Dissection.  The object is to seat the cube inside of the frame, as shown.  Magnets prevent it from seating incorrectly.  It’s an elegant, but not difficult puzzle.

The above shows a classic puzzle that I found out about in a magic lecture.  Alright – the first mention of my two hobbies intersecting (although technically the YOT from my previous post started off as a magic trick)!  The lecturer was Mark Wilson, the magician who created magic on TV.  I think he was in his mid 80’s when I saw him a year or two ago.

Wilson emphasized performance and entertainment.  He and his wife distributed ropes and corks, and taught us all a few rope tricks and this puzzle with 2 corks.  The corks are rubber corks with his name printed on them, but the puzzle can be done with anything that has a similar shape, like batteries or tubes of lipstick.  The object is to start with the corks in the crotches of the thumbs, as shown above.  Then, simultaneously use the thumb and index (or middle) finger to grab the cork of the opposite hand, winding up with the corks and hands separated:

It’s surprisingly hard to figure out.  The best puzzle solver in the office, Mike Butler, refused to try this because he had seen it before and failed to figure it out.  However, despite the fact that I learned it at a magic lecture, it’s not a magic trick.  You can do it exactly as described.

By the way, I grew up in Michigan and did my undergrad at the University of Michigan (class of ‘91). I now live in California!

This is the jumping King Tut from Bits and Pieces.  It is similar to the One Piece Packing Puzzle in that the object is to seat the mummy in the cask despite opposing magnets.  The solution is different, though.

I got this puzzle just before Christmas.  One of my favorite sites, Cubic Dissection, was having a sale on this.  It’s one of the few puzzles they sell but do not manufacture.  The puzzle is named because it contains all 5 regular polyhedra: an icosahedron (20 sides), dodecahedon (12 sides), octahedron (8 sides), cube, and tetahedron (4 sides).  I have a special attachment to these polyhedra since dice of all these shapes came with my first “Dungeons and Dragons” set I got in elementary school.  Yes, I am a nerd – you probably realized that just by the URL of this site.

The octahedron is inside of the tetahedron, which is inside of the cube, which is inside of the dodecahedron, which is inside of the icosahedron.   It’s an interlocking puzzle: the point is to disassemble and reassemble it.  It came shipped with all regular polyhedra assembled separately, with the extra parts separate.  The extra parts are between the octahedron and tetahedron; and the tetahedron and cube.  The extra parts are each either a tetahedron or one half of an octohedron.

I was able to reassemble it relatively easily.  That’s one reason why this is an interlocking puzzle I like: I can actually solve it.  When it’s solved, only the icosahedron is visible:

Afterward, I fully disassembled everything:

This was tougher.  The only real problem, though, was assembling the 6 faces that make up the cube.  Figuring out how to add the extra parts between octahedron and tetahedron is trivial.  It’s a little harder between the tetahedron and cube, but while there are 16 pieces that fill in the gaps, they come in only 2 varieties, so it’s not too bad.  The dodecahedron and icosahedron are tricky, but there are only 3 parts to the dodecahedron and 5 to the icosahedron, so it wasn’t too bad either.

The puzzle was invented and originally produced by Wayne Daniel.  It sold for a few hundred dollars and sold out very quickly.  Now it’s mass produced and can be bought for about $40.