Brick Wall - Lucie Pauwels by Pelikan

I recently acquired this cool puzzle from a fellow collector, it’s a ‘put-together’ type puzzle with room underneath to store the pieces.

I’ve previously seen similar tray designs by Alfons Eyckmans and this particular one by Lucie is quite difficult.  

My plan of attack for solving these is a process of elimination by placing the oddest shaped pieces first then filling in the rest, however that’s still a tricky endeavour with this one.

I was surprised by the overall size of this puzzle by Pelikan and it’s cleverly made so that you need to flip the pieces out once you hit a dead end!

Kevin Sadler wrote about it:

“I have been watching Lucie Pauwels’ designs with great interest over the years. She seems to create them in her head using simple home-made blocks and always manages to produce puzzles that are very different to those of the other designers out there today. There does not seem to be a computer used in the design process and this means that the puzzles that she creates are human solvable and require proper thought and logic to do so. The Brick wall is a chunky puzzle (20.5x15x3cm) made from a gorgeous vibrant Bubinga and Maple. The reverse side of the puzzle is a tray which holds the pieces (Maple) which are to be the grout in the tiled wall. There are 11 differently shaped pieces of grout which need to be assembled inside the wall. The premise is very simple but the actual solution is not. I started as I always do with a random insertion of pieces in positions that looked good. With Lucie’s puzzles, this approach really doesn’t tend to work well and it ended for me several times with an almost, but not good enough assembly: After a whole 2 days of failure, I decide that it was time to think© and use some logic. The pieces are shaped in such a way that there can be only one solution and the best way to go about it is to restrict the positioning of a certain few pieces from the very beginning. Once that has been done, the sequence for insertion is really pretty logical – there is a little trial and error where a piece has a little vertical symmetry but it only requires a quick test to see which way around it goes to allow other pieces in. Despite the fact that this looks like an impossible trial and error challenge, believe me, it is not. Like most of Lucie’s puzzles, this is a test of logic which you will really enjoy once you have decided to go that path. It will also look absolutely gorgeous on display.”

I decided to make a box to keep this puzzle in out of Black Limba with a Red Zenrawood Sleeve and Wenge Slipfeathers.