The Blue Knight is made in Canada by PuzzleMaster, which offers a wide range of wire puzzles from easy to extremely hard. The puzzle has the shape of the letter K and attached is a handle with a golden ring. Your task is to "simply" remove the ring.

As always, PuzzleMaster's wire puzzles are made with a beautiful nickel-plated finish, giving a very pleasant appearance and smoother manipulation, not to mention that it doesn't leave any metal smells in your hands, which is a big plus.

The Blue Knight is rated as a 9/10 puzzle (Gruelling), but either I'm getting way better at solving this type of puzzles or it is probably not as difficult as it seems, because I managed to solve it within 15 minutes. Not bad at all for a level 9 puzzle.

At the ends of the K shape are four different types of obstacles: Some allow the handle to pass through, but not the ring, others are small enough to pass inside the ring, but the blue beads don't let the handle go through. Obviously, the back end of the handle is large enough to not let the ring go through there... You have to carefully analyse the puzzle and check what steps are required in order to free the ring.

One of my fellow puzzle friends has told me a nice way to look at this type of puzzles that helps to solve them, sort of... One of the first things you have to realize when trying to solve a wire puzzle is to imagine it solved and process the steps backwards. In other words, in which part of the puzzle do you see the ring getting freed? Which parts might help you get there and which ones are dead-ends? Easier said than done, right? - But it makes sense, because just fiddling with the puzzle and not having any idea what you're doing won't get you far.

I won't go into specifics as to how to solve the puzzle, but one thing you should be aware is, from those four obstacles in the K shape, which ones allow the ring to pass? - I can tell you that there's only one and that's where the ring will exit. Now, you just have to find a way to do that. If you still need more help, you can download a .pdf solution here.

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The Blue Knight is available at PuzzleMaster for about $16 USD. To find more wire puzzles, check out their wire section.

Closing Comments:

My adventure with wire puzzles hasn't been always a smooth ride. I feel they get the best of my thinking abilities, but at the same time they push my patience and frustration levels to the limit. As I've been saying for a while now, I love them and I hate them.

I loved the Blue Knight, not just because I was able to solve it in a short amount of time, but because I loved  to discover the steps until the final solution. It's a very rewarding feeling, only possible when you know you solved a hard puzzle.