Hanayama Cast Puzzle: Cast Cage

Puzzle: Cast Cage
Brand: Hanayama
Inventor: NOB Yoshigahara
ST: ~15 m

Cast Cage

This is the Cast Cage from Hanayama, rated level 3 on their scale of 6. Having black and gold as the color choice, it has a unique appearance. This puzzle was similar in concept to those "free the..." puzzles, such as this one, but also had it's own different features. A dark cage, with openings on four sides, imprisons a star, and your goal was, of course, to rescue it. The star's legs has different lengths, and the openings were also different shapes. Only one was (supposed to be) the correct exit, and you'll need to find both the correct opening as well as the series of movements of the star in order to take it out.

Star out of it's prison

After a few tries I quickly deduced where the opening should be and after some fiddling the star was out! Putting it back I tried to do the solution again to make sure I remember it, and showed it to a friend who was at the time with me. He was also able to have done it pretty quickly- but had it out on a different side! Thinking he's broken the puzzle a panicked Will took the puzzle back only to find that there's not just one solution... There was three! I don't know if it was a defective on my puzzle or a general problem, but with the design that's a little inconsistency. Somewhat similar to my experience with the Cast H&H-It is not too big a problem but does let down the overall rating of the puzzle.

Despite that the Cage was another good cage-type puzzle to fiddle with, and I say with Hanayamas the more the better! And as usual, the link to the shop.

Hanayama Cast Puzzle: Cast H&H

Puzzle: Cast H&H
Brand: Hanayama
Inventor: Oscar Van Deventer
ST: ~20 min

Cast H&H

Here's another Cast Puzzle for review: the H&H. At first sight it doesn't immediately show how it should work-but after picking it up it became fairly obvious, like the Cast Disk. The puzzle consists of two "H" shaped pieces intertwined with each other, some grooves on the puzzle makes it not possible to just pull the pieces apart but having to go through a serie of movements in order to separate them. The puzzle is a 3-D maze, and has some really interesting moves. It somehow resembles another puzzle in the series, the Cast Keyring, with similar aspects. As you can see in the photo the name and brand is engraved onto one of the piece, a little detail Hanayama puzzles always have.

The H's in pieces

Now although the puzzle was rated 5/6 in my opinion it was rather easy and I personally would rate it as more of a 3 or 4. Though there are other problems such as solving the parity issue the maze don't have too many dead-ends, and when it do, they don't extend long. I solved the puzzle rather quick-in total there were 26 moves at my count, although there was one kind of move the solution did not use, which is a bit let-down for me. A few days later, I was surfing on the web, and finds a copy of the solution of the H&H. But the problem is-the official solution was totally different with mine! It turned out that the puzzle has actually multiple solutions, and th official solution includes all six moves, not counting that it was the shortest one with only 20 moves (no pun intended). I'm not a big fan of puzzles with more than one solutions, but I guess for some maze puzzles it's just impossible to prevent that. Despite that, the Cast H&H pops out on the range of maze-type puzzles because the way the pieces interact with each other is very clever, maintaining your interest and made the solving progress fun.

On the shelf the nice silver coating made it look nice, and with the reasonable price you just can't go wrong with buying one here.