This is another one of those categories where I couldn’t pick just one item to describe. The Hanayama Cast Puzzle aka metal Puzzles, come in so many unique forms.

Hanayama is a toy company in Japan founded in 1972. They have created many of these cast puzzle games. The idea is to figure out how to disassemble the piece, then try to reassemble it. I will be describing a few of the cast metal puzzles I found to be the weirdest or coolest. In my family, jigsaw puzzles are usually very popular at holiday gatherings, but I think I might be shaking things up a bit this year with these cast metal puzzles, as well as wire puzzles, and yes, even chocolate puzzles. I will let you browse around the source store for the ones you think are the best.

The one you see above is called the cast starfish. This cast puzzle is suppose to be two mackerels fighting around a starfish. Just looking at the image below, I already don’t get it. How are you suppose to get that thing off? That’s the point I guess.

This is only level 6, and it’s classified as “tricky”. It only gets harder from here.

Another level 6 metal cast puzzle. Mixed reviews on the source website but I think it looks cool. However, I’m not really sure if it would be trickier to figure out this puzzle, or the rules of the actual game of cricket. 

This cast puzzle is from the highest difficulty level I could find. According to the manufacturer description, the solution changes every time you try to rearrange them to reassemble it. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds really hard.

There are difficulty levels from 1 to 10. This one maxes that out.

This is the Hanayama cast metal puzzle difficulty rating chart. You can reference this for selecting the right metal puzzles for your and your family. It starts at Level 5, which is considered easy, and goes up to a maximum of level 10 which is considered mind boggling.