Edge matching puzzles

You have any number of small edge matching tile puzzles.  What do you do with them?  If you are like me, they are chucked in a drawer and forgotten.  Left alone and unloved, they simply cease to exist as a puzzle.  And yet, some of them are rather beautiful  Most are very colorful, all are worthy of a second look.  

We have this motto of "Display and Play", and this category of puzzle has been problematic for me.  What do we do with them.  If they stay in the drawer, unless I label it in neon paint, they will never see the light of day again.  Last week after a conversation with Rob of Rob's puzzle page, we have a solution.  Wall space in the corridor to the gym! We use part of this to hang magic puzzles and another part to hang sliding tile puzzles.  You know the kind: those that every collector has but never really touches. Well, the edge matching tile puzzles are the same.  And we have wall space in that corridor.  The ceilings in there are 7 feet high and the length is 20 feet.  Forget the door in the middle, there is room enough for at least 75 of those puzzles.  Going against my natural need for order, I placed these puzzles rather randomly along the walls.  I first hung the largest of the frames and followed that up with progressively smaller pieces.  We end up with a rather large hodge-podge of puzzle viewing.  Sprinkled throughout the corridor are a number of symmetric shape puzzles, a few folded playing cards, and any number of old IPP table cards. 

Technically these are not Display and Play as I put each of them in a poster frame or a photo frame.   But if anyone were to want to play with them, it is easily done.  Because these puzzles are the type that need to lay flat, I added a bit of BluTack to the back of each piece and mounted them that way.  Not all of the puzzles are solved. To be honest, I don't take great pleasure from them so I lost interest after I did 12 of them this afternoon.  (I've subsequently realized that many of the puzzles which are from the same companies have exactly the same solution. Lagoon Games is especially guilty of this. If you are looking for a challenge, don't bother with them. Once you've solved one, you've quite literally solved them all.)  

The poster frames are from Walmart and run about $6 each.  The photo frames I got from the dollar store.  The floating frames are from Michaels and are rather expensive at $26 each, but thankfully we only have 3 double sided puzzles.  The shadow boxes were also bought from Michaels and I managed those for $11 each on a sale.   George wouldn't let me spend more on the frames than I did on puzzles.  Although there are 6 of them I bought in HK for less than 50 cents US so I guess I blew it on those frames.  

After the frames came in, I decided that maybe I would solve most of them after all. The smaller 9 square versions take very little time now.  I guess I've done enough of them that I can spot the similarities right away.  The larger 16 and 25 piece puzzles are a bit trickier. I'll be honest, a few of them just gave me too much gas so I left them for someone else to deal with.  As you saw from last weeks blog post, George even helped out solving that rather unique one we found.  The final puzzle to be solved was the Rubik's tangle 10x10 grid.  It combines all 4 of the 25 piece tangle puzzles.  Unfortunately, it is unsolvable.  It turns out the manufacturers printed a duplicate of the wrong piece.  It's a good story to tell though.  

I used small 3x5 and 4x6 frames to hold a number of symmetrical puzzles, IPP table puzzles, and impossible cards that we have been given. The final items to go on this wall area will be a few old Rubik's jigsaw puzzles that I got back in the 90's. It's about time I put them together.  

All in all, I am quite pleased with the way this new display method has turned out. Thank you Rob for the suggestion. You helped rescue these puzzles.

48 Queens Puzzle-Roxanne's take

 Wow!  What a puzzle! This was found in a box of older IPP exchange puzzles.  It was probably made during the early 1990's but we can't be sure as we don't read Japanese.  On one side there is a standard edge matching puzzle with some child-like cartoon animals.  On the other side is the 8 queens puzzle that George wrote about last week.  Either puzzle is quite difficult.  

This puzzle was designed by Hisayoshi Akiyama.  He attended first at IPP 9.  Over the years, he has designed many puzzles and written a number of books on puzzles.  His puzzles can be found on Cubic Dissection as well as at Puzzlemaster.ca.

After scratching my head over this for a few days, asked George if this puzzle could be put into a solution on both sides. Sadly, the answer is no.  One side at a time only.  

My next question was can it be made using additional colors so that no square is without a colored circle and still be solved.  Again, Burrtools came up with a definitive no.  

Again, thanks to Rob, we now have an additional link that gives some information on this puzzle.  Sadly, it's in French.  "There is another solution to the superposition of six sets of eight queens each on an 8x8 board, published by Lucas (inventor of the Towers of Hanoi problem) in his 1895 book, on page 232: https://archive.org/.../larithmetiquea.../page/n231/mode/2up".

As a bit of background, edge matching puzzles were invented by E. L. Thurston in 1892.  A copy of his original patent can be found  here.  They are  puzzles which have an edge color, image, number, etc. that must match the adjacent piece.  A very detailed explanatory article can be found here.   These are readily available in stores everywhere.  Puzzlemaster sells the scrambled squares puzzles for a relatively low price.  They can also be found on many other online sellers.  As for me, I've spent the past few weeks solving this type of puzzle and have decided they just aren't for me. I eagerly await George's Burr Tools program so I can put the rest of the unfinished puzzles on the walls.  

48 queens puzzle

George is at it again this week.  He's given us a link over here if you wish to open this as a pdf.  The pdf has a clickable .xmpuzzle files for your pleasure. The .xmpuzzle files need to be downloaded for viewing.  Hint: you'll also need Burr Tools.   

Here is a preview:  

The latest puzzle to catch my attention is one called 48 Queens on 8 Cards which was published in Japan and designed by Hisayoshi Akiyama.  It comes on 8 cards which can be laid down into an 8x8 array of colors and spaces.  Each card is a 2x4 array containing exactly 6 different colors and 2 spaces.  

Mr. Akiyama (the inventor) writes “You know of the famous ‘8 Queens Problem on a chess board’.  This puzzle is a new variety of multi-queens problem.  There are 8 cards, each one has six different color spots.  In this puzzle, I mean the same color spots as Queens to be hostile to each other, and different color spots as queens to be ignored with each other”.  

Please let us know if you prefer to read these posts online, or as a pdf.  We would appreciate any feedback on the usability of the pdf format.  The conundrum lies in the use of xmpuzzle files as a means of communicating puzzle strategies and solutions.  The blogger editor is somewhat simplistic and not user friendly for a first time blogger.  The pdf format allows George to have greater (easier) usability.  The blogger program also does not allow us to copy and paste images into it so even though I can add the entire post here, the images will not show up.  I feel like I'm learning this all over again.

Please do click on the link.  It's a great article. 

Thanks