Loyd's 15 is one of the most popular sliding puzzles of all time. Comprising 15 sliding tiles across a 4x4 grid, the missing "16th" number provided an empty space to move the tiles around the frame and solve the puzzle in a variety of solutions. Ever since its first introduction at the end of the 19th century, countless designs of the 15 Puzzle were created. One of such designs was made by Doug Engel, and I love its originality. It's made by BrainWright and it's called The Block & Roll Puzzle, and instead of numbers, you'll be playing with colored marbles.

So, how does this work? Is it just a simple exchange of numbers for colors? Well, not exactly. At first glance, there seems to be very few similarities between this puzzle and the classic version, besides the fact that you'll be sliding your way around a 4x4 grid. And indeed, the two puzzles couldn't be more different... and that's a good thing.

15 marbles make up the four groups of orange, yellow, purple and green colors. Unlike the original 15 Puzzle, here you'll be constrained by two barriers that will prevent you from freely navigate the marbles from one row to the other, just like a labyrinth. This is clearly seen in the photos, where two of the rows (one in the front and another in the back) have been cut in half and no marble can pass across it. This will, of course, raise the difficulty to a higher level than the original version.

One thing that I always like about puzzles is the ability to create patterns or to have multiple solutions. Here, The Block & Roll Puzzle does this in great style, as it offers you 44 different challenges with patterns to reproduce exactly as you see them. The challenges will be quite difficult, as the first two challenges seen in the photos took me around 30 minutes to solve. Not a bad thing, though, since I like a good challenge.

Closing Comments:

Loyd's 15 The Block & Roll Puzzle is yet another great sliding puzzle that I'm happy to add to my collection. The concept is different from what I'm used to see in sliding puzzles, and the high difficulty will certainly test your patience and solving skills. Definitely recommended.

Availability: The Block & Roll Puzzle can be found at PuzzleMaster for just $14.99 CAD. Check out other cool puzzles by BrainWright.

Over the years I've come to really enjoy puzzles made by BrainWright. They always have these original designs that are quite fun to play with, but also rather challenging. And that's what I look for in a puzzle, really. Cat Stax, created by Bob Ferron, is such a cute and nice puzzle that will delight cat lovers around the world.

The puzzle comes in a travel-like package, which is light and small so you can take it with you to kill some time on a long trip. Inside, 12 different cats await for you to start playing with them. To get you started, 48 challenges divided in four difficult levels promise to keep you busy for quite a while. You can also put your creative skills to the test and create your own puzzles, since there are almost infinite combinations to stack and nest the cats in all sorts of arrangements.

As expected, the 3D puzzles are much harder and complex to solve than their 2D counterparts. Nevertheless, if you solve the puzzles in the correct sequence, they are introduced gradually in difficulty, so it's not like you're thrown an impossible challenge. Since I'm more of a fan of 2D puzzles, I naturally like them better, but I also had fun with the 3D challenges. The only drawback is that, because you don't have a box to place the pieces inside when solving a 3D challenge, it's much more difficult to visualize how to stack the cats together. Other than that, this is a great puzzle.

Closing Comments:

Cat Stax is a really cleverly designed puzzle. As a cat lover myself, I found it very entertaining and challenging enough for my solving skills. If you're not that fond of cats, don't despair, there's also a dog version and a farm animals version.

Availability: You can find the Cat Stax puzzle at PuzzleMaster for $21.99 CAD. Check out other puzzles by BrainWright as well.

Brainwright has been issuing lots of great puzzles lately. I commend their creative department for discovering and bringing these magnificent puzzles to the masses, which otherwise could remain unknown for many of us. Fortunately for me, I already know about Kate Jones' work and her fantastic contributions to the puzzle community over the last few decades. First produced by Kadon Enterprises, the Iamond Hex puzzle is now reissued with a new look, more affordable, but all that made it a great puzzle is still present in all its glory.

Made with 12 dissimilar acrylic pieces in three colors (yellow, red and blue), the Iamond Hex  puzzle features all kinds of shapes made possible by joining six equilateral triangles at different angles (hence the name Hex). No two pieces are the same and they all interact with each other in different ways. This makes the puzzle quite versatile, so you can create countless patterns and figures beyond the main puzzle featured in the provided tray.

There are many solutions for the main petal-shaped puzzle. By mixing and combining the colors in different patterns, you can find a total of 55 solutions, some of which are very difficult to solve, like getting all three colors grouped. Kate Jones' puzzles are always a joy to play with, because of their many solutions and possible shapes you can create with the puzzle's given pieces - They give you a lot of bang for your buck, and are worth every penny.

The Iamond Hex comes packed with lots of challenges, like symmetrical shapes and other interesting puzzles using only some of the pieces. For example, with just four pieces you can create double-sized models of each of the 12 hexiamonds. Which pieces to use will of course be up to you to find out. An even more difficult challenge is to make a tripled model of 9 of the hexiamonds, since three of them are not possible. Doing all of them will certainly keep you busy for a while, if you don't give up by then.

The most interesting challenges, however, are the symmetrical shapes you can create out of the tray. There are hundreds of possibilities to discover, and included in the booklet are 15 for you to solve. Be warned, though, these are very difficult, because you won't have the tray to guide you by limiting the edges of your puzzles. This is why the symmetrical shapes are so challenging, but also so addicting.

Finally, if you like to play strategy games, you can play a couple of them, included in the booklet. Rules and explanation of the games are easy to understand, so anyone will be able to enjoy playing with friends.

Closing Comments:

Whether you like to play solo or with someone, you can be certain that you will thoroughly enjoy Brainwright's Iamond Hex. There are hundreds of challenges and solutions here to make any puzzle fan happy for a while, and for under $20, it's difficult to find a better choice to occupy your free time in the next few weeks.

Availability: I got my copy of the Iamond Hex puzzle from PuzzleMaster, which is available for just $16.99. Check out many other interesting puzzles from Brainwright.

Links:

Brainwright's official Website

Kadon Enterprises Official Website

George Miller is best known in the puzzle community as a puzzle prototyper, helping designers to transform their ideas into something real and palpable. However, he doesn't just make other people's ideas come true, he also does this for himself with his own designs and he's pretty good at it. One of such puzzles is the Flexi Cube, a versatile puzzle with six different challenges made by Brainwright.

What I really liked about the design of the Flexi Cube was its bright colors and the unusual shape of the pieces. The ability to build the cube into different color patterns is a very welcome bonus for those of you that are not satisfied with just one solution - Mind you, there's only one solution for each of the six challenges.

The Flexi Cube basically works like the classic Elastic Cube (seen here from my collection). Each of the 12 pieces is connected to two others by an elastic string, allowing you to bend them in any direction. When solving one of the challenges, two pieces can be joined together to form one of the six faces of a cube, much like a jigsaw puzzle. The idea is to turn the flat pieces (2D) into a cube (3D). The cube is small, about 4.7cm in diameter (1.85"). The pieces are made of thick and durable plastic and the string is of very good quality - won't break unless you really stretch it to ridiculous lengths. When a cube is made it will hold together quite firmly until you disassemble it again.

I didn't solve all six challenges, but was able to make three of them in a relative short time (10 minutes). Overall, I didn't find it very difficult. The challenge that was probably harder to make was the one that asks you to get each side of the cube with different colors. I'm just not sure if my interpretation of "all sides different" is the same as them, because what I ended up with was each side with two different colors, but opposite sides have the same color combination. Now, if that's not the solution, then I guess I found a seventh challenge, since it doesn't match any of the others. The easiest challenge might be getting one single color on each side (there are six different colors). Here, you just need to find a way to join two pieces of the same color together and then work your way until you have all six sides with a solid color. The third challenge I solved was more like a random solve, ending up with four different sides and two of the same color.

Closing Comments:

Even though I didn't find the puzzle that much challenging, I honestly thought it was really fun to play with. I like how the pieces fit together with their curved inside shapes, and the possibility of multiple solutions is an added incentive to keep playing for a bit longer. By being a simple design devoid of any complexity, anyone with a curious mind can easily pick it up and try to solve any of its six challenges. You can also fold it into other shapes other than the cube - Thanks for the tip, Pantazis!

Availability: The Flexi Cube is available at your favorite Canadian puzzle store, PuzzleMaster. Check out more cool puzzles by Brainwright.

Additional Challenges:

Brainwright is a recent discovery of mine, but so far I've been quite impressed with some of their puzzles. I only have a couple of them and another few that were later "adopted" by them, like the Rudenko's Disc or the Roundominoes. The one you see above is called Hexus and it's a logic game for one player with 44 challenges.

The name Hexus comes from the shape of the pieces, each in a different arrangement of hexagons that are linked together. The seven pieces are all distinct and they can be rearranged in many different ways inside the honeycomb-shaped tray, which is itself a collection of eight hexagons adjacent to each other.

Fortunately for you, the game starts off pretty easy, as the first few challenges only require a couple of pieces to be placed on the board, since the rest are already in their correct positions. As you progress, though, fewer and fewer pieces will be put in the board at the beginning, until you reach the final levels where you have to fit all the pieces with no help. You can flip the pieces on both sides, so you'll have more possibilities to fit them.

Closing Comments:

I didn't find the game very difficult, even on the last challenges. Yes, these final ones are more challenging, but with only seven pieces and a tray with a fixed shape, there's only so much you can do. To make it more interesting and more difficult, you can start every challenge from scratch instead of placing the initial pieces - Just the white one. I did find it very fun to play with and quite enjoyable, because of the unusual shape of the tray and the pieces. The pocket size allows you to carry it anywhere with you.

Availability: The Hexus game is available at PuzzleMaster for $18.99 CAD. Check out the other Brainwright puzzles and games here.

On the Dot is a very cool game from Brainwright with a simple but rather clever concept. Invented by Dominique Bodin, this game is a re-edition of the original Vitrail (translated from the French as stained glass) launched in 2006.

This concept, however, is not entirely new. If you're familiar with the Transposer puzzles, this is very similar in the way that you have to overlap cards so that they show a specific pattern. The game comes with four sets of transparent cards, each set in a different color. The pattern you see on each card is the same. In the other words, the position of the four dots found in each card is always the same, but the color arrangent differ from card to card. What's fascinating about it is that you can rearrange the cards in so many different patterns by just rotating and flipping them in any direction.

There are some rules you need to take into account in order to play the solitaire game. You can also play the game with more players, but for now let's just focus on the main game. There are 60 challenge cards included in the game. There are no difficulty levels indicated in the cards, but you can tell if it's an easy or a hard challenge by the number of dots that appear on each one.

To start a challenge you need to pick one set of transparent cards with the same color border and find a way to overlap all four cards so that only the spots on the challenge card are shown. The secret is to find a way to hide the spots you don't want to appear. The cards have to overlap in a square, not diagonally or other odd directions.

Most of the challenges are pretty easy to solve, even the ones that show more than four spots. What I found most interesting is that it didn't matter which set of cards you choose for any challenge. Each set has four cards with different color arrangements, but they're identical in each of the four sets. The reason there are four sets is to play with up to other three players. The rules are simple: just pick some challenge cards and race against your opponents to finish all the patterns first.

Closing Comments:

On the Dot is a pretty fun game to play. I prefer to play it alone, as I'm not very fond of playing multiplayer games. If you liked any of the Transposer puzzles this one will certainly please you as well.

Availability: On the Dot is currently out of stock at PuzzleMaster. Keep checking back on their website for updates on availability. In the meantime, you can check out other interesting puzzles and games from Brainwright.