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It's always difficult to give advice about what's a hard puzzled and what's not. Everyone, every puzzler, is different! Some puzzlers really like Rubik's cube type twisty puzzles, they might even be into speedcubing! and yet they can't separate two pieces of a Hanayama puzzle that we might have given a rating of 5/10. They just don't have any interest in doing it, or in that type of puzzle.

But we've been brave and tried to put some sort of relative rating on most puzzles. Our difficulty rating system is explained here.

Brian says by way of explanation "I remember many years ago the first time I did a basic 6 piece burr from a disassembled state and it took me a little under a couple of hours to solve, understand and be able to do at will. This has become my benchmark and I call it 7/10. Fluking it and not being able to repeat does not count. I grade puzzles up and down from that." Maybe not the most scientific way of arranging puzzles by difficult but we've not found any other system that is more accurate yet.

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We've brought together puzzles from our Difficulty Ratings of 8 to 10 (out of 10). The page is intended as a general guide only and puzzles are not listed in order of difficulty, they are mostly grouped together by type and maker, but you can filter by difficulty rating.

If the puzzler always seems to be able to solve any puzzle at will within minutes then you may want to give them puzzles that are very difficult. Yes. You want to give the person a challenge. But remember you don't want to discourage them right away by buying a puzzle they'll never have a chance of doing. So if you're buying your first puzzle, or a first puzzle for someone else, perhaps this is not the page to start.

“And don't discard the easiest puzzles either. You can get just as much of that "Ah-Ha!" feeling from doing them too!”

Here at Mr Puzzle we've made many of the hardest puzzles ourselves. Brian is well known for his amazing Limited Edition puzzles, particularly his sequential discovery puzzles and the current offering of the SMS Box is no exception. He thinks it's definitely the hardest puzzle he's ever made and so do many of the puzzlers who bought it.

But also represented on the Very Difficult Puzzles category are puzzle makers from other puzzle categories. There are very high level burrs by Bill Cutler, Junichi Yananose and Frans de Vreugd. And we have to include the 7x7x7 V Cube with the mechanism patented by Panagiotis Verdes.

Traditional puzzles get a mention on the very difficult puzzle page too. What could be harder than working out all the moves to remove the looped handle from the rings? We've been playing with it since the second century and not many of us have mastered it yet.

And a puzzle definitely does not have to be cost a lot to be difficult. Mr Puzzle's own Tricky Dick is a good example of a puzzle for under AU $20.00 US $13.59 that is diabolically hard for the price. There's even a AU $12.50 US $8.49 wooden honeycomb puzzle on there that's crazy difficult!

Don't forget though. Even if you can never do the puzzle it doesn't mean it's faulty. Just that you can't do it. And most of our puzzles come with solutions so that if all else fails you can take a peak and get a hint, or go all out and solve it with the solution.