In my never-ending quest to acquire all of Jean Claude Constantin‘s designs, I recently got from PuzzleMaster the Centrale puzzle. I was very curious about this design, mainly because I already had two puzzles from Robrecht Louage that have this same concept – Free a coin that’s trapped in a maze.

Centrale is a relatively small puzzle, measuring only 8.9 x 5.7cm (3.5″ x 2.2″) and, just like the designs from Robrecht, there’s a sliding platform with a 5 cent euro coin that needs to be placed under the larger cut-out circle in order to free [Read More...]

Category: All Puzzles, Wood Puzzles

Knight Moves comes from Ken Wessen. (Not to be confused with Night Moves, the song by Bob Seger)  If you’re familiar with the famous Knight’s Tour problem, you’ll like this – it’s different.

In the Knight’s Tour, your objective is to move the knight onto each square exactly once.

In this puzzle game app, your objective is to move onto the light squares only!

Hey, this is free!

Category: All Puzzles, iPhone/iPad Puzzle Games

Hana Yama make an excellent collection of cast puzzles.  Their puzzles are exceptionally well made, a real challenge to solve, are immediate attention grabbers, beautiful to look at and feel great in the hand.

When you pick it up, it seems so loosely connected together; that one thinks it should fall apart.  As you play with it, it will remind you of a set of dentures rattleing in a blizzard.  I can’t think of any other puzzle like it.  It consists of 4 pieces of chrome metal, quite small, but heavy for its size.  No doubt about it; it well [Read More...]

Category: All Puzzles, Metal Puzzles

The Scrambler puzzle has a long history.  It got started around 1834, traveled around Europe testing people’s skills. It was brought to North America by Pioneers. It was simple to make, even with very basic tools. Today it is made by many companies around the world. There are several different ones here at various prices. Who knows, it may even have been the puzzle that prompted many other “sliding block” puzzles such as the 15 Puzzle or the more recent Rush Hour. There are several sequences whereby the puzzle can be solved, some requiring more moves than [Read More...]

Category: All Puzzles, Wood Puzzles

Can’t believe it’s over a year since I reviewed my last Twisty Puzzle. I guess I neglected this category a bit, and considering it all started with the one and only, the Rubik’s Cube, it definitely deserves a little more attention. Well, what better way to resume the Twisty reviews than a puzzle based on the Rubik’s Cube itself, Meffert’s 3x3x3 Bandage Cube.

The puzzle dates back from 1999, and while it’s produced by Meffert’s, I don’t have any information about its inventor. The mechanism is basically the same as the classic 3x3x3, but has a [Read More...]

Category: All Puzzles, Rubik's Cube

http://gottasolveit.blogspot.com/

Luma Link is a series of 300 puzzles where the object is to slide the tiles around until the silver ball can go into the red hole. The silver ball can travel to an adjacent tile.

Tiles can move horizontally/vertically ONLY IF the selected tile has a matching colored tab with another tile on that same row/column. You’ll notice that some tiles have tabs only at 12 o’clock & 6 o’clock: they can only move up and down, never side to side.

I have done all the medium & hard levels.  The presentation is slick. This [Read More...]

Category: All Puzzles, iPhone/iPad Puzzle Games

Earlier this month, my newest book entitled Exceptional Eye Tricks was released.  The book features nine chapters of different categories of optical illusions with additional information about the illusions located in the back.  One of these chapters is devoted to “motion illusions”.  These types of illusions are static but appear to be moving (as if they were animated).  As such, they tend to be very popular on the Internet.  While the effect is noticeably better when viewed on a computer monitor, they also work well in print.

The cover of this book features a great example of a motion illusion [Read More...]

Category: All Puzzles, Optical Illusions