Well... after the package with a couple of hundred puzzles arrived,
I had the luck to play with many interesting new pieces. As usual,
there were puzzles worth playing with, and puzzles which.. ahem...
they better stay inside their box forever...

In any case, most of them were very interesting, and here are the
ones that kept me really hooked:



On the top left, is the "Laby Box", a very interesting labyrinth/sliding puzzle!
On the right of "Laby Box", is "the drunken dancing Fraulein", which is essentially
a trick box. On the right of this puzzle is the "Tornado", which made me nuts
till I found both solutions. Below the "the drunken dancing Fraulein", is the
"Crazy Bottles", a puzzle based on the old jug and bottle problems (interestingly,
for a long time, I had a completely different way of materialising this concept!).
The non-regular hexagon on the left is "Triple Play", which employs one of the
most ingenious interlocking (while simple) combinations I had seen. Below the
"Tornado" is the "Magnetic Madness", which is a dexterity puzzle based on magnets,
but it is so fun, that kept me laughing all the time. The tiny octagonal colorful puzzle
on the right is the "Air", a marvelous construction, made of four identical pieces.
At the bottom left, there is the "Four to Square", one of the most challenging fitting-
to-frame-pieces puzzle I had ever played with. On its left, there is the Japanese
"Slide Out" (there are more "Slide Out" variations, but this was by far my favourite).
Finally, on the left of the "Slide Out" is the "What is the time. a fine clock-like matching
puzzle implementation.

I hope you liked this mini review.




Pantazis

I have been enjoying mine as well. The Four to Square is not just great because the shapes are really deceiving (many "almost" solutions), but because it is made of welded stainless steel. It is heavy!

Dave

Exactly! And the funny thing is that I came across all those "almost" solutions
(even in terms of μm units!) that I thought the puzzle was actually flawed!
At some point I even tried to use some of my hardware tools to make it fit!!!
Little I knew that all this was deliberate. A great puzzle to carry with me.




Pantazis

Are any of these available for purchase? These are all right up my alley and missing from my collection.

-d

I imagine I won't need to keep the full set and could be persuaded to sell some that are not my style.
I can absolutely sell my own exchange puzzle and in fact just made a few more. I need to post about that...

PM me and we can figure something out.

Dave

Actually, there have been waaaay too many times when I thought that some IPP puzzles
were not of my liking, and then several months (or years!) later to discover that they
had embedded a brilliant mathematical (or insert another here) idea and concept.

Trust me, you will be glad when you find out about such ideas while you still have those puzzles!
(that said, there are quite a few which are just being washed up ideas - a fact that even
the designers of those puzzles sometimes admit!)




Pantazis