I found this particular puzzle pretty easy, but I have a lot of experience with puzzles (recently because my kid likes them).
If you want to train novices up to solve very difficult puzzles of this style (or whatever style), start with very simple puzzles and build your way up in a sequence of steadily increasing difficulty, introducing only about one new trick at a time.
I'm curious, are there any particular tricks you used for this puzzle? I basically just used reasoning and trial and error, but wonder what methods may have helped me solve it quicker.
It’s helpful to me to “chunk” puzzles into specific sub-objectives. I split this one conceptually into a “top area” (house, bone, boat) and a “bottom area” (tree, flower, well, carrot).
The tricky part of this puzzle is getting the rabbits down from house to tree. In order to move anyone from the top area to bottom area, you need to have someone in the bottom area shuffling back and forth, and also someone else in the top area.
Specifically, you need to get one rabbit to the bone (dog must be at carrot) then move the dog back to the flower so the other rabbit can go down to the tree. Once one rabbit is in the bottom area the dog can move to the top area to help get the other rabbit down.
Took me about 2 minutes to figure out what to do, and then another few minutes of dragging stuff around to execute. But again, I have been doing a lot of puzzles with my kid recently, so this kind of thing is top of mind.
I disagree with this completely. The level of difficulty is just enough to get the brain properly churning with a manageable level of frustration without being completely impossible.
I never said this isn’t a fun tricky-but-not-too-tricky one-off puzzle for out-of-practice adult puzzle solvers. (It has one key trick that someone who doesn’t do very many puzzles might take a while to figure out.) I only said it was pretty easy for me personally.
I further claimed that if you want to train complete novices (I am thinking of my 6 year old here, or his less experienced 6-year-old friends) to solve very hard variants of this puzzle, you should start with easy puzzles and introduce one new trick at a time. If your goal is not to train novices to solve hard puzzles, then feel free to disregard this advice.
There are some fun harder tricks that you can throw into this genre of puzzle (not included in this particular example) that if you tried presenting to my 6 year old would completely stump him. But after working his way up methodically he could be taught to notice and solve them.
If you have kids, I would recommend the physical puzzles made by the company Smart Games. We have a bunch of them and they are generally fun, clever, sturdy, and sequenced pretty well. We also like the Rush Hour sliding car puzzles.
I don’t know too much about puzzle video games (web or otherwise), but we have this week been playing the recently released game Railbound which is pretty fun and has some quite tricky puzzles.
If you want to train novices up to solve very difficult puzzles of this style (or whatever style), start with very simple puzzles and build your way up in a sequence of steadily increasing difficulty, introducing only about one new trick at a time.