Puzzles « Robot Claw

Archive for the ‘Puzzles’ Category

Picross For Bastards!!

Sunday, April 16th, 2023

Remember that insane Picross book I blogged about last year. I finished the Bastard!! puzzle. Here it is:

The accompanying contest required the entrant to identify the character in the puzzle from the three choices of Dark Schneider, Kall-Su or Tia Noto. Can you see which one it’s supposed to be:

Yep of course it’s Dark Schneider! That would be like making a Star Wars picross and having someone like Sio Bibble instead of a leading character!

The puzzle took me many hours over the last seven months, although to be honest I gave up on it at the end of last year before returning to it today for a five hour bender that has ruined my eyes. Alas I’m 7 months too late to win the Dyson vacuum cleaner, but I’ll forever have the self-satisfaction that I beat it.

Now about the >100 other puzzles in the book, not to mention the second book I bought since that last post…

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The Bonkers Picross Book

Tuesday, September 20th, 2022

I bought this last time I was in NYC:

KLS and I both enjoy Picross puzzles, and even without opening it I knew I’d be buying it. Here’s what the cover says:

Summer 2022 Anime Feature?!? Fun, beautiful and easy to draw? Dream co-star feature?!? Sheep with presents??!?

This was my sort of book!

Picross is the puzzle where you fill in squares in a grid to make a picture according to the numbers along the edges of the rows and columns. If it says 4 that means 4 connected squares. 4 2 would mean an unconnected blocks of 4 and 2 along that line (or column). It’s fun 🙂

The book is loaded with puzzles – over a hundred – and they get difficult almost immediately. The above photo are all the ‘easy’ ones they have, and after these you dive right into this sort of madness:

The difficulty difference between the eggplant and whatever the above is is tremendous, and it would take a great deal of time to solve.

But this book has incentives for beating the puzzles! When you finish one you can answer the question next to it (which seems to usually be ‘identify this character’) and submit your answer to win a prize, some of which are very nice:

As befits an anime themed puzzle book, many of the prizes are for anime/game fans as well. Alas the submission for entry was September 19 (yesterday!) so it seems I’ll miss out.

If you’re some sort of Picross god and have no trouble with that 45 x 50 shown above, this book has you covered, since it even has several large fold-out puzzles including this lunacy:

That’s 60 x 200, or 120 times larger than the goat I did above. This would be a monumental achievement to complete. I wonder how long it will take me?

And if you’re just masochistic, the book even includes some (harder) colored picrosses, including this fold-out one:

Yes, it is as difficult as it looks.

Oh and if you’re wondering what these look like when finished, the book also includes the full solutions to the previous issue, which it seems was anime-themed as well:

Since I’ve done the easy 10 x 10 puzzles I’m moving on to a bigger challenge: a 45 x 50 one featuring characters from the Bastard!!! anime:

I’ll follow up if I ever manage to complete it 🙂

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The Impossible Puzzle?

Sunday, February 25th, 2018

I bought two of these:

It’s a tiny red jigsaw! I was looking forward to making it and today is the day. Here’s the pieces laid out:

They’re small… very small. This small:

As usual, My first step was to sort out the edge pieces. This took longer than it should because of their size and the fact they’re shiny and reflective. Then it came time to assemble the border…

Time passed…

More time passed…

And then I realized the puzzle has a fatal flaw: the fronts of the pieces are slightly smaller than the back! This means – especially due to the size – it’s ~~virtually~~ actually impossible to pair them by sight:

Notice the pieces don’t quite look like a fit in the left (which is the front)? Every piece is like this. It’s a nightmare of trial-and-error, and I’d estimate with about 3x(150!) combinations the universe will end before I was done!

So yes, I gave up 🙂

Oh and the other one I bought? It was cardboard and apparently didn’t suffer from this flaw because Bernard already made it! Ask him and he’ll tweet a photo.

(Also the several other plastic Pintoo puzzles I have bought haven’t suffered from this weird issue. I blame the excessively tiny pieces.)

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Let’s Make A Jigsaw!

Thursday, October 19th, 2017

Kls received this for her birthday:

What’s this? A ‘gyutto size series’ puzzle? Here’s what was inside the box:

The pieces are small and plastic! They’re also transparent:

It’s a stained-glass puzzle! She waited no time before making it, starting (as everyone does) with the border:

Hmmm, a transparent puzzle in poor light against a black background? That made it more difficult! But she soldiered on:

And on…

Until a few hours later (over two days) it was done:

Well… nearly finished! Can you spot the missing piece?

Anyway we found the one that had got away and put it in place. It’s a pretty image, and here it is backlit:

If we were going to display it I suppose we’d want to do so with a light behind it. But for now, back into the box it goes, to be assembled again some day in the future 🙂

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Birthday Aquisitions #5: The Rest

Friday, March 17th, 2017

A few months ago KLS and I found this in a local arcade:

I was dazzled, not just by the fact it was the worlds largest Pac-Man, but by the fact it used a giant bank of LEDs for the display:

So imagine my surprise when Florence sent me this for my birthday:

It’s a Pac-Man clock using LEDs for the display! And it animates!

The animations are of Pac-Man being chased by or chasing the ghosts, and are perfect recreations of the arcade sprites and colours. All using just LEDs:

I love it and it’s proudly displayed in my study! Thanks Florence!

Now I know we’ve been doing the birthday thing for days now and it’s obscene how much stuff I got but this next item – speaking two weeks down the road from my actual birthday – has turned out to be the thing I have used the most:

Yep, a ‘gherkin fork’! I have taken to occasionally buying gherkins and they’re just not the same unless eaten with a quality long fork. Yes I know it’s metal and yes I’m a weirdo that doesn’t like metal in his mouth but for this fork and a delicious gherkin I’m making an exception!

Mum and Dad: maybe I’ll bring one to Oz next time to replace the one that ‘got lost’ 🙂

There’s a few other gifts I was going to list today (a sterling engine, the new Zelda, some tools…) but they will likely get their own posts eventually. I’ll end with one last item, very recently received in the mail from none other than Bernard:

A 3D Rilakkuma model! As with the Pac-Man clock had I known this existed I would have bought it for myself already!

So there you have it: a mostly comprehensive series of posts documenting much of what I got for my birthday. Too much to be true, and – since I bought much of it myself – tailor made for me.

I’ll end with a request: Of all the items I listed this week, what item(s) would you most – or least – like to own yourselves?

You never know. If it’s a Guy N Smith novel maybe I can make your wish come true 😉

Posted in Blog, Crafts, Games, Miscellaneous, Models, Otaku, Puzzles, Tech | 2 Comments »

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