Cast Devil / Twins / Devil's Claws

Many of you will have most likely worked out by now due to my lack of posts about them that I'm not a huge fan of disentanglement puzzles. This is mostly due to the fact that I have the uncanny ability to turn perfectly workable disentanglement puzzles into an incomprehensible, jumbled, nigh irreversible mess, usually within seconds. So I tend to steer clear of them in general. However there are the odd one or two which I have taken to, and that is usually because there is no way of screwing them up. Here is one of those puzzles:

This is a classic puzzle that you will see in loads of different places under many different names. I have no idea of who the original designer was but I believe it first came about somewhere around the very early 1900s. This particular one you see in the pictures was called 'Twins' and it was picked up from Village Games in Camden, but it is probably best known by it's most recent name of 'Cast Devil' as it was remade by Hanayama as one of their 'Cast' series of puzzles.

As you can see there are only two solid pieces, which is a big selling point for me not only because there is no way I can screw it up but also because the goal is immediately obvious. The two pieces are also identical, which is always a nice touch.

Although there are only two pieces the puzzle is not trivial, but not exceptionally difficult either. The first thing I did is work out how the two pieces would have to go together in order to get tangled, and then I worked backwards from there to suss out the solving sequence. I think it took me only a few minutes to work out how to solve it reliably, but it could take a while longer if I had tried to 'force' a solution by random jumbling rather than working it out logically. Hanayama rate it as a level 4 out of 6, which is a little high in my opinion. I would rate it more as a low level 3.

If you were to take the two separate pieces of this puzzle and drop them together right in front of someone it is likely that they still won't be able to pull them straight apart, which is also quite cool if you like torturing people with puzzles like I do.

All-in-all a very nice puzzle! Even if you don't like disentanglement puzzles I would definitely recommend giving this one a go. And it is currently available from Puzzle Master along with the rest of the Cast series.