Review: Cabbie Conundrum

Comment

Comment by Erik on May 25, 2009 at 12:53pm

Great review Nate; I'll add one or two points with some photos of the troublemakers.

First off, there are now three Troublemaker puzzles that have been released. The first was the two solution Valentine's Day 2009 puzzle (VD2009), the second two were Cabbie Conundrum (CC) and London Larceny (LL).

For example, VD2009 allowed some empty space in the "holding" area, but not in the central puzzling cavity:



As I worked on CC which by the way is a two fork rating () puzzle with four solutions, I didn't know what the rules were going to be. Unlike VD2009, there was clearly no space for all four of the possible passengers to "fit" inside a holding area.

Having played Ubongo (and Ubongo Extreme) a lot, I recognized this as an area tiling problem and counted the number of basic triangles making up each passenger. You get different numbers so if you find one solution that "fills" the playing field, than if the others are higher you have a problem, if the others are lower you are going to have some empty spaces.

Because the "troublemaking" pieces do not appear to be double cut as in a trick style puzzle, you can get greater numbers of swaps. However, you get a less perfect fit too, for example, is this a correct fit?



Some of these "fit" issues and my inexperience with troublemakers caused me to email all four of my solutions for Cabbie into Stave to check if I "got it" in a way that I haven't in the past for a trick puzzle. This is not a complaint per se, but more just a heads up to puzzlers.

Also, the troublemaking pieces have less image continuity than is typical in a trick puzzle. Since each piece is an independent tile, there is no continuity of image across the "montage" of pieces. So if you see a person half on a tile you are unlikely to see the other half of that person anywhere. Contrast this to some trick puzzles where great attention has often been paid to making say the lines of a piece of artwork "match" in both directions or using the changing art to tell part of the story.

I think in that respect people who are very "image oriented" about the content of their puzzles may find the troublemakers less satisfying as a group because there is little image coherence beyond the theme of the puzzle. This is mostly an abstract area placement "game" and quite enjoyable and well thought out, but the images do not mean all that much and do not offer as much opportunity, IMHO, for the artist to show off her/his talent as in many of the trick puzzles.

I am going to be very curious if Steve can come up with a sort of 2nd-generation troublemaker where there is more image coherence among the troublemaking pieces. E.g. lines that match/connect/make solve a maze/electrical circuit/track/route to different destinations/or some such.

To that extent, LL which I am either completely done with or just one small "piece juggling" exercise from being finished with, and which comes in at four forks () and is described as having eight solutions is the first attempt at broadening the troublemaker concept. In LL you are trying to help the police (bobbies) solve a crime by identifying thieves in each of four rooms, removing them, and revealing the priceless treasure that they were attempting to steal. As a satisfying add-on, you haul the thieves away in the police car. Since this review is meant to focus on CC, I won't add too much about LL here, though I would not really describe the puzzle as having eight solutions. Though I see how that number was arrived at, but by that "score" ten solutions would be a more apt number. I think it is more apt to say there are two primary solutions and each solution is compartmentalized into fixing one of the five primary troublemaking cavities, each of which has two solutions. The tableau with three challenges looks more similar to the catalog text for some of the trick puzzles such as the city puzzles than multiple solutions. Anyhow save that for LL review.

So troublemakers as a category, some thoughts:

• Initial puzzling is probably closer to working a teaser puzzle than a trick puzzle
• Working the multiple solutions is more like working a trick puzzle or a push fit area of a traditional puzzle, but so-far the range of tasks is more constrained because there is a set of triangular non-jig-interlocking pieces to shuffle for the solution
• I am going to go out on a limb and say the most difficult troublemaker so-far is easier than a three-bolt trick, because the task is better understood, though it may take more time if you are not good at area tiling
• Image theme/continuity may be an issue for some with the troublemaker puzzles, each troublemaking piece is a very independent tile and if you are big on art "coming together" you may be unhappy
• I can imagine some follow-on troublemakers that combine troublemaking with changing frame shapes/trick elements or even troublemaking pieces that have trick or monkey fist/crazy claw joins that could be insane! Similarly, doing more work with the art to "line" things up in multiple configurations could be maddening as well
• Overall 'nuts should definitely give a troublemaker a try and to that end maybe Stave would consider also making VD2009 generally available for order?