Welcome back Puzzle Master's Puzzle Insider. I'm your host,
Greg from Puzzle Wanderer. And in this series,
we bring you the hottest news from the ever expanding world of puzzles.
Free the Peg,
the first puzzle from MW Puzzles started as a puzzle for friends and family, as a
sword and stone concept, but change to a peg after Matt,
the designer of MW Puzzles discovered that there are other puzzles with the same
theme. After Free The Peg was featured on Mr. Puzzle's channel,
it got high praise and made a big impact.
And the next puzzle from Matt is coming soon. It's name is The Penny Pincher.
I've got some information about it today, but before that,
let's get to know Matt Williams from MW Puzzles.
Matt is a tool maker with deep understanding of how things work.
A big football fan, following Aston Villa and Formula One.
He's pretty new to the puzzle world. After seeing Mr. Puzzle videos,
he got hooked on high quality puzzles.
His favorite puzzle is the Lotus by Wil Strijbos,
which also was the first puzzle to inspire him. His style is all about quality,
precision and uniqueness. My puzzle design is to focus on quality and precision.
All of my puzzles will be able to be solved logically without any luck or force
element needed.
I would like to think of my designs as unique and well crafted and spent many
hours developing and testing concepts before bringing them to market.
The Penny Pincher is now in production, which is the second puzzle from Matthew
Williams. Sadly, I can't show you the puzzle itself.
The puzzle itself is black.
It has a logo of The Penny Pincher on the side. It has a brass circle on top; it
looks like a button, but I can't truly say.
And on the side it has a large bump,
large circle bump, with a notch on top. And inside this bump,
there is something that looks like a penny.
I guess that is the penny you have to get out of the puzzle,
but it's also made of brass. And it looks like on the side,
it has a peg like in Free, The Peg, but I am not sure.
Overall it looks very mysterious and cool. And I would like to try
this puzzle myself. This puzzle is a sequential discovery puzzle with a tricky,
but fun solve, of a similar size and look of Free The Peg.
The long term goal is to make production cheaper, so they can make the puzzle in
a more affordable price.
They want everyone who wants the puzzle to be able to buy it.
They are trying to produce puzzles in higher quantities than today.
He's an amazing puzzle designer for collectors.
He sells his puzzles at really reasonable prices, even low prices for the quality,
if I may add. He also got a recent new batch of puzzles.
His name is Stephan Baumegger; on Facebook, he is called Puzzleisure.
You probably know Stephan Baumegger from his renowned puzzles. Excaliburr,
the monstrous burr, almost no one was able to solve on the internet, other than
Mr. Puzzle. Did Christian solve it in the end? I don't remember.
And Thor's Hammer, which is also a monstrous burr puzzle.
Most of his puzzles are themed in very nice themes,
which is amazing to see.
I asked him just some random questions for entertainment.
Did you ever try solving Excaliburr without Burr Tools? Keep in mind,
this is one of the hardest burr puzzles in the world.
Turns out that when he made bigger batches of Excaliburr,
he was able to assemble it without Burr Tools.
For those of you who don't know, Burr Tools is a program that helps you to assemble burrs.
So at the moment, he isn't able to do it with Excaliburr,
but that requires insane (inaudible) skills.
We haven't seen any sequential discovery puzzles from you in a while,
are there plans for new ones? That's true. The last one was
Cosquer Cave Box, but there is only one copy, so less fun for all. I mean,
I'm prototyping process for
a new sequential discovery puzzle. When I'm lucky and all will work
like I thought, it might come at the end of the year. So that's cool news.
How do you find theme ideas for your burr puzzles? So that changes.
Sometimes he has a concrete idea and he tries to get it done in a burr shape.
Sometimes the idea is growing during working with the shape in burr tools.
Stephan is a real skilled wood turner. So he also tries to use his skills in wood
turning to make unique shapes like the Holy Grail.
What is the design you are most proud of? Each time it's a great feeling,
when the latest idea gets real and you hold it in your hands.
There are various things to be proud of, like
when I am able to get high level for a simple burr -
that's marvelous. If a puzzle like Excaliburr gets viral with YouTube videos, that is
sensational. For my packing puzzle, Spheres, I am really proud.
It has all I want for a puzzle. This is the Spheres puzzle.
The goal is to pack all the pieces inside and it's extremely,
extremely beautiful. It has wooden pieces
and also has amazing looking marbles inside.
I actually agree that this puzzle is one of the prettiest puzzles I have in my
collection and is indeed amazing. Both puzzle-wise and looks-wise.
Thank you very much, Stephan. And let's move on to the next article.
I recently developed curiosity to a type of puzzle,
I never liked, due to the science behind it.
These are wire puzzles and rope puzzles.
They look impossible to solve due to the structure,
but if manipulated in a specific way, they can be taken apart.
One of the ways to solve these puzzles is based on topology.
This is a branch in mathematics that has to do with the shape of things and how
many holes it has and so on and so forth. Sadly,
even after watching numerous videos about the topic, I can't really explain it
because I'm not native and because it's so complex.
But there are people that can actually use topology to solve and analyze these
kind of puzzles, which is mind blowing to me.
And I would really like to get to this level. If this actually makes these puzzles
even more fascinating to me, because I have no clue about them.
I find that one of the most interesting parts in puzzle solving, is getting
from the point where you have no clue about a puzzle to the point that you
understand how the puzzle works. Do you like wire puzzles?
Let us know in the comments and also feel free to say the names of which puzzles
from this type, you like to solve.
I hope that this will be helpful to everyone in this community. And let's move on
to the designer of the month.
A young designer from the UK has been 3d printing from the age of 12. He lately
got into puzzle design; around 10 months ago.
His favorite puzzle is the Boxing Kangaroo from Karakuri.
He got inspired with puzzles on Chris Ramsay's channel and then applying ideas and
spent hours implementing them. This is Elamite Prints.
He's been making a large variety of puzzles lately. He started with some symmetry
puzzles and then started to develop into more unique sequential discovery
puzzles, like the Poseiden's Vault,
which got really high praises. And also the Crane puzzle,
which is just something I have never seen before. So that is actually extremely cool.
(Inaudible) plans,
a set of three sequential discovery puzzles that use tools from former puzzles
in the series.
There will also be a storyline with videos and an SD card found in the puzzle.
The first puzzle will weigh almost one pound, and will be made from brass and aluminum.
Currently it's called, The Chill Pill.
Now I am extremely looking forward to see this series of puzzles. From having a
talk with Elamite
Prints, it really seems like this guy has a lot of enthusiasm for puzzle creation and
puzzle design.
His creations are extremely unique and he also wants them to be as unique as
possible, cuz that's part of this design idea.
My favorite thing about Elamite, is that he is a very brave and he's not
afraid to try new things. That is something super important, in my opinion,
in designing new puzzles. Nowadays,
there are a lot of puzzle types that work and you can kind of take the concept
and implement it on your puzzle. Now, I don't know how Elamite Prints does it,
but it seems like his puzzles use completely original concepts,
which is pretty rare nowadays, especially as the puzzle world is so big
and so many ideas have been already - there's a good world for this - exhausted.
It's cool that Elamite brings his own ideas to the table.
Hopefully, other designers can also learn from him and take these ideas to
their puzzles. Let's move on to the Creator of the Month.
This guy, you've probably heard of, because he's a very, very long time YouTuber.
Can Chris Solve, now called Cuberly.
His name is Chris Harrison. He's 25 years old from Manchester UK. In his
spare time, he plays some music, also uses his own music for videos, actually,
and learns to speak modern Greek.
The reason why I really wanted Chris to be in this Puzzle Insider edition, is because he
took one year break from YouTube.
And I was really curious why he did that and how he feels now that he is back.
According to Chris, his job was very demanding and required a lot of creativity and
exhausted him. He didn't have the power to produce videos.
Now he has a more relaxed job, so he can resume making videos again,
which is awesome for everyone. One of the best things about Cuberly
or Can Chris Solve is that he is very laid back.
The content is very chill and is very peaceful.
And Chris overall feels free in front of a camera.
His favorite favorite puzzle YouTuber is Oskar van Deventer. On YouTube,
he's called Oskar Puzzles, where he shares his newest puzzle creations.
His inspiration is Red KB, Unbox Therapy and Chris Ramsay.
Each of them give a slightly different aspect to Chris' channel. For example,
Red KB is all about twisty puzzles, while
Chris Ramsay is more artistically inspiring.
I'm not a huge fan of puzzles that don't have a logical sequence or an element of
discovery. For example,
I don't truly consider some of the Hanayama puzzles to be puzzles, because to solve them.
you just have to discover or accidentally stumble upon, the puzzles gimmick. My least
favorite is probably the Cast Marble which took me about a minute to,
solve. My favorite puzzle would have to be the Treasure Chest puzzle box by J Kovell.
I'm a huge Legend of Zelda fan, which is the inspiration for this puzzle.
And it has a unique solution that was really satisfying and fun to solve.
Also, of course, love the Rubik's Cube, which started my love for puzzles.
And let's move on to the Featured Puzzle of Month.
This will be quite interesting as we interviewed this puzzle designer in the
first episode, in the first interview of Puzzle Insider ever.
And this is Felix Ure.
We were interviewing him for the Piston upcoming puzzle release.
And now that the puzzle is released, I'm interviewing Felix yet again, to
check out some new information that has come. Piston is a huge success. It's
already been on Chris Ramsay's channel. Mr Puzzle also uploaded it already.
It will probably be coming to Puzzle Guy's channel very soon, as well.
This is the longest sequential discovery puzzle from Felix Ure, available to the
public at large. It's a seven stage sequential discovery puzzle.
The objective is to find the brass ball and it weighs over one kilogram,
which is insane.
When I asked Felix what his favorite thing was about the puzzle?
He says that it weighs a lot, which is amazing.
This is actually a combination between two puzzles that Felix has not released.
Two prototypes, that he didn't think were good enough as a puzzle on their own,
but together they made the Piston, which is, according to experts,
really brilliant and probably one of the best puzzles from Felix, so far.
Felix started off with a bang.
Really his first puzzles were really successful and I believe that from here on
probably every puzzle that Felix will release will be a hit.
If you didn't see the interview with Felix on Episode One,
I urge you to check it out,
because there is a lot more information about Piston back there.
And some interesting information that I got from him now, that I didn't have
before, is that first, it took him hundreds of hours to design Piston,
and actually Felix's way to design puzzles is very interesting.
There were months where I'd be designing it in my head, while doing other things.
So it's hard to put a number on it for that reason.
Even after conceptualizing it, there were hundreds more hours doing drawing,
CAD, prototyping, testing, et cetera,
which is all really part of the design process. This is a huge,
huge number of hours. Also,
there is a possibility, if you'd be interested in that, to make bespoke puzzles,
to commission puzzles from Felix... For example,
he had some hammered Titan and hammered Hip Flask versions,
and you can also request a hammered Piston puzzle,
if you'd be interested in that. The last time I spoke to Felix on Puzzle Insider,
he said that he's planning a puzzle box. So it's not fully tested,
but he thinks that the idea is cool. It's just,
whether it works reliably and if it does, it will be a puzzle.
And other than that,
there are many new puzzles in various stages of development, in my sketchbook,
computer and head. So once I'm finish designing one,
I'll move on to the next partially completely designed. There's a long,
long queue of partially designed puzzles, so there's plenty more on the way,
even if they take months or years to become a reality. So as you can see,
Felix is here for the long run. He's here to stay.
There's many new puzzles coming up from him, probably in the next months and
years, so stay tuned for that.
And that was it for today's Puzzle Insider video. If you enjoyed this video, I'd
really appreciate it, that if you like it, subscribe or go below the video.
If you'd like to see any specific articles on Puzzle Insider,
I will make them especially for you.
Thank you very much for joining us and we'll see you guys in the next video.