Puzzles – Page 3 – Robot Claw

The Bonkers Picross Book

September 20, 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 🙂

The Impossible Puzzle?

February 25, 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.)

Let’s Make A Jigsaw!

October 19, 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 🙂