Cast Amour

Happy Valentine's Day everyone! I wasn't originally going to update my blog today, but as my other half has bought me a Valentine's themed puzzle it only seemed right to write the review today.

This is the Cast Amour, another great little metal puzzle from Hanayama. It is made up of three pieces which are the silver colour plate with four holes through it, and two gold colour male and female symbols which overlap each other through the holes in the plate. The goal is to disassemble the puzzle into it's three separate pieces.

It isn't particularly difficult to solve but the first move did have me stumped for a little while. Hanayama rate the difficulty of the Amour as a level 5 out of 6, but personally I would've thought that it should really be one of the higher end puzzles in the level 4 range.

I have to say that I don't like the look and feel of this puzzle compared with some of Hanayama's other pieces, and the reason for that boils down to a few main things;

1) The silver plate feels a bit flimsy in the way that it rattles against the other two pieces, and that detracts from the quality of it a bit.
2) It is very difficult to put the Amour down and have it stay in it's unsolved starting position, which means it isn't too good at being a display piece.
3) I don't particularly like the gold colour.

Now please don't get me wrong, I still think that this is a great puzzle, and the three points that I mentioned above are purely because of my personal preference, so there's a good chance that you may not feel the same way.

My girlfriend bought me this puzzle as a Valentine's gift from Village Games during our trip to Camden. But you can also buy them from loads of online retailers including Puzzle This and Puzzle Master.

Also have a read of Brian's review of the Cast Amour here: LINK