Puzzle review

[Elder Iptuous]

So, i like physical puzzles.  and there's an assload of pretty damn good ones out there on the market.  My father in law has a good collection which i have sampled, and i have shelled out some bucks for a few of the really good ones (like this one i'm about to tell you) and some of the classic ones (like the horseshoes and ring, rubik's cube, etc.)
So I just got this one today for an early christmas present from my mother in law.  It's called Perplexus...
http://perplexus.net/products.php


The name sucks.  It bothers me.
The colors are gaudy. I'd rather they not suck, too.
The game/puzzle is really good though.
It's a dexterity puzzle with a ball on track type schtick encased in a clear plastic sphere, obviously.  When i first pulled it out and screwed around with it for a minute, it seemed pretty simple and it looked like it wouldn't take but a couple minutes to go through it. 
after coming back to it later today i realized that what i thought were three separate little tracks are just three starting points that you can choose such that once you pass the first section, which ends continuously where the second one begins, you can start there after you fuckup.  This is necessary because on the second part, you fuckup a lot.
a lot.
there's some little twists that make you want to chew your fucking lips off just so that anyone around you might not question the sincerity of your grimace.
at that point on most games i feel that it suffers from an unnecessarily difficult hoop to jump through that doesn't add to the elegance of the game.  On this puzzle, however, i haven't found anything that isn't a worthwhile difficulty, so it keeps you interested.
there's also, some little tricks in the path that, although not difficult, are clever, and add to the gee whiz even after you've gone through them fifty times.   A few of the curves, although not terribly dangerous, cause the ball to roll faster than comfortable after the previous tricky sequence, and make you oh shit every time, even though you've never fucked up there.  that's good design.

so, if you like puzzles. buy this one.

What puzzles have any of you done lately that you found particularly good/notable?

[rong]

i like the golf ball and tee inside a snow globe.  pretty simple puzzle - you just have to balance the golf ball on the tee, but it's kinda tricky to do.

i have a few tavern puzzles (like the two horseshoes and ring).  i recently re-solved one that i hadn't seen since i was a kid.  the only way i can describe it is that it's sort of inspired by bell and you have to get a ring off.

i had another puzzle when i was a kid call "spin out" that looked kinda hard, but turned out to be kinda mundane.

never could completely solve a rubik's cube.

here is a puzzle you can make yourself:

all you need is a block of wood and eleven nails.  roofing nails are too short.  finishing nails don't have enough of a "head" on them.

pound one of the nails into the block of wood just enough so that it stays put.  80% of the nail should still be sticking up.  the puzzle is to balance the 10 remaining nails on the head of the nail you just stuck in the block of wood.

this page illustrates the puzzle, but also gives away the solution, so don't look at it if you want to figure it out on your own. 

[Elder Iptuous]

I would imagine that the type of nail has a decent impact on how one might solve it....

[Dimocritus]

i like the golf ball and tee inside a snow globe.  pretty simple puzzle - you just have to balance the golf ball on the tee, but it's kinda tricky to do.

i have a few tavern puzzles (like the two horseshoes and ring).  i recently re-solved one that i hadn't seen since i was a kid.  the only way i can describe it is that it's sort of inspired by bell and you have to get a ring off.

i had another puzzle when i was a kid call "spin out" that looked kinda hard, but turned out to be kinda mundane.

never could completely solve a rubik's cube.

here is a puzzle you can make yourself:

all you need is a block of wood and eleven nails.  roofing nails are too short.  finishing nails don't have enough of a "head" on them.

pound one of the nails into the block of wood just enough so that it stays put.  80% of the nail should still be sticking up.  the puzzle is to balance the 10 remaining nails on the head of the nail you just stuck in the block of wood.

this page illustrates the puzzle, but also gives away the solution, so don't look at it if you want to figure it out on your own. 

I peeked. Pretty clever, though.

I dig these labrynth-esque style puzzles. Where did you pick this up?

[Elder Iptuous]

assuming you are asking about the puzzle in the OP, i got it from a momnpop toy shop near me.
I don't know if it's at the big box toy shops, but if it isn't it's available for 20 something bucks on the intarwebs...

[rong]

I would imagine that the type of nail has a decent impact on how one might solve it....

you are correct.

[Chief Uwachiquen]

I couldn't ever solve a Rubik's cube either. My way of solving it was taking it apart and putting it back together solved.  After I was told I couldn't do that I swapped stickers until it was right.

[Dimocritus]

I couldn't ever solve a Rubik's cube either. My way of solving it was taking it apart and putting it back together solved.  After I was told I couldn't do that I swapped stickers until it was right.

That's the only way I can do it, too. Really, though, where in the rule book does it say that that's not an acceptable way of solving the puzzle? Unorthodox, yes, but against the rules? I don't think so. You're just thinking outside the box (cube?).

[Kai]

One of the classics that I really enjoy is The Towers of Hanoi.

[Triple Zero]

One of the classics that I really enjoy is The Towers of Hanoi.

Why?

It's not so much a puzzle, more of a computer programming exercise. It's not really challenging, just takes a while to solve, but the procedure to do it is very repetitive.

I can't find the article anymore, but I once read a blog about game design that said, programmers please stop including Hanoi into your adventure puzzle games, it's not challenging, and basically shows that you were out of ideas and Hanoi is just so easy to implement.

I did check on Wikipedia, a more interesting challenge seems to be to get from one arbitrary state to another specified state in the least amount of moves (as opposed to moving all the disks from one peg to another). But the problem is of course less elegantly formulated as a puzzle.

[Triple Zero]

yeah that thing is awesome, I can't fathom why they stopped selling it.

The database it uses was a snapshot from the self-learning system at 20q.net

and wow it seems like they started selling them again! swote! http://www.20q.net/

[Dimocritus]

I had one of those globes you play 20 questions with. I think it was called an IQ. It plays Animal Vegetable Mineral with you, and seems to have quite a good database in it.

Bloody thing spanked me every time, unless I was being deliberately obscure (lit. lying to myself & cheating), or using any alcohol, drug or tobacco or pop culture references. hours of fun that was.

Yeah, 20Q was pretty cool, for a little while. Even if you were going for something that you knew would not be in there, it would still kinda' nail it. For instance, if what you were thinking of was, say, the female genitalia, it would give you the answer "Pussy Willow."