Hi Cristian! So for people who aren’t aware, you are behind the puzzle brand NoWay Puzzles. The first design you came up with was Gearly and your second puzzle Cuplik has just been released. What was your inspiration to start making puzzles?
Hi! Thanks for setting up this questionnaire. I’ve always been passionate about logic games, logic problems, mental calculation, brain teasers and so on, and I was always excited to create something new, but I was never able to share my inventions with people. With puzzles I found both a way to express my creativity and lateral thinking, as well as exploiting my handcrafting, designing and modeling passion and knowledge and the way to share them with people through my friends, puzzle reviewers and disseminators as well as international shops like Crux Puzzles who believed in me and in my creations. In particular, Crux Puzzles was the first shop who made an order from NoWayPuzzle.
Gearly was a very interesting debut puzzle, did you set out to design a puzzle and then come up with ideas or did the inspiration come to you and the you sat down to work out the details?
When I came back from my research period in California, during which I spent a lot of time watching puzzle reviews, I finally decided to make my first design. After a few days thinking about the shape of the puzzle, I imagined 2 gears interlocked by themselves. During successive months I did my best to solidify this idea, and at the end I decided to insert the hidden mechanism.
What would you say are the key components that make a good puzzle?
From my point of view, the criteria that make a good puzzle, which I’m trying to follow are:
Differentiate as much as possible from standard puzzles and try to create always something unique on the market.
Simple looking puzzles, with eye-catching aesthetic and colors, which seems impossible to solve at the same time. Showcase objects with good, well finished and treated materials. Durable items and hours of fun.
Tricky puzzles of various styles for experienced puzzlers, but still enjoyable for all people and always with a feasible logical solution. A pleasant and intriguing complexity to share with friends.
Puzzles will not be released until they are not improved at maximum capacity under every point of view, and tested by many trusted puzzlers with different levels of experience. I prefer to put put my focus on fewer puzzles, than vice versa.
Cuplik is an interesting puzzle, it looks like a Rubik’s cube but the solution is obviously not the same. Where did the idea for this piece come from?
Cuplik is an extraordinary puzzle, it’s a tribute to Rubik’s cube and it’s dedicated to my friend and youtuber hydemagician since he loves Rubik’s cubes and performs magic shows with it. The idea of separated cubes colored on all faces came up immediately; the longest part was to manually color them!
Your say you’re interest is in designing puzzles on the difficult end of the spectrum, is there a reason you are attracted to harder puzzles?
I think harder puzzles require at the same time a higher effort from puzzle designers, so they first of all represent a challenge for me. Usually it does not require much time for me to imagine a new puzzle and to design a first shape, the more difficult part is to make it challenging. Challenging does not mean impossible to solve, but it means as much difficulty as possible as long as there is a logical way to achieve the solution. I think this makes the puzzle more special, and doesn’t filter out people who are able to solve it; my first ideology is that mechanical puzzles are for all people.
Cuplik has just been released but is there anything else you are working on at the moment?
Sure, I’ve two other functioning puzzle prototypes, which I really love. I’m just fixing the last details and then I’ll start testing and sharing them. They both are really special and unique on the market, look forward to sharing them with people! I’m working on them from 2020. A spoiler exclusively for you, which refers to both puzzles could be: not just a puzzles… =)
Finally do you have an all time favourite puzzle not of your own design?
I remained impressed by T8 Popplock Puzzle Lock by Rainer Popp. I’m fascinated by the way he merged a physics principle with the puzzle.
Well thanks very much to Cristian for taking the time to answer our questions! If you’d like to keep up to date with NoWay puzzles you can find the site here.
If you’d like to take a closer look at NoWay Puzzles you can find both here;
