Rectangular Jam

RECTANGULAR JAM

It is time now to review the second IPP puzzle designed by Hirokazu Iwasawa, the RECTANGULAR JAM. It was his entry into the IPP 2005 where it got a "Honorable Mention" award. I bought my copy at Sloyd in Finland (Euro 19,15) whereas there is a cheaper but quality wise even better version available from Philos. However, I wanted to buy an orginal with a green coloured bar :-)

The RECTANGULAR JAM is a sliding puzzle, which means you have a rectangular box with 4 bars in it and all having the same length and width, however, the green bar is thinner. Now you are given a starting position of the puzzle and the target is to move/slide the pieces in a way that the green bar can be slided through a small hole on the opposite site of the starting position. Whilst the difficulty rating for this puzzle is 3/4 (difficult) it just took me less than 10 minutes to solve (may be because I recently solved one of his later puzzles - the ODD puzzle - which uses a similar technique in a way).

I think it can be recommended to every puzzler but if you are no collector you should rather choose the Philos version of this particular puzzle.