Best Hanayama Puzzles: A Cast Tier List

Quick answer: the Hanayama Cast puzzles Greg rates as must-haves are the Cast Medallion, the Cast DNA and, for anyone new to puzzles, the Cast Horse. The ones to skip are the Cast Vortex and the Cast Valve.

Best for: anyone about to buy their first Cast puzzle, and anyone who already owns five and wants to know which of the rest are worth it.

Hanayama's Cast series is the most widely owned line of mechanical puzzles in the world, and it is enormous. That combination is exactly why people get stuck: there are dozens of them, they all look broadly similar on a shelf, and the difficulty rating on the box tells you how hard it is but nothing about whether it is any good.

Greg ranked them. What follows is drawn from that, including the bits where he talks himself out of his own first opinion.

Why Rank Hanayama At All?

Because it is the one series where a guide actually changes what you buy.

In Greg's words from the video, Hanayama is the strongest brand of high quality cheap puzzles as of today, and the variety is so wide that it is one of the only series worth guiding people through at all. With a handcrafted wooden puzzle you are mostly choosing a maker. With Cast puzzles you are choosing between forty near-identical-looking objects at near-identical prices, where some are brilliant and some are not.

Worth stating plainly, because he does: this is opinion. It's all my own opinions, it's not based on history, logic or research. It's all based on my personal feeling right now, and this can also change in the next years. That is the right way to read any tier list, including this one.

We do not sell Hanayama. Nothing here is us recommending our own shelf, which is rather the point.

Watch: The Full Cast Puzzle Tier List

Every puzzle, placed and argued for, which is more than fits on a page. This article covers the standouts and the reasoning; the video is the complete board.

How Do the Tiers Work?

Six, built live in the video and worth knowing because the names carry the judgement:

1. Must Have Hanayama - buy this one
2. Amazing Experience - excellent, just short of essential
3. Fun Puzzle - genuinely worth owning
4. OK - fine, nothing more
5. Not The Best - skip unless you are completing a set
6. Horrible Waste of Metal, Time and Brain Cells - the bottom, and he means it

Most ranking videos stop at "good" and "less good". Having a bottom tier that rude is what makes the top tier mean anything.

Which Hanayama Puzzles Are Must-Haves?

Cast Medallion. The clearest verdict in the whole video. A complex maze where the moves are elegant, it's fun to play with, it feels like a video game. He has solved it more than ten times and can now do it in two minutes, which is the real test of a puzzle: whether you go back to it. It's a must have Hanayama in my opinion.

Cast DNA. Two pieces, and they are simple. How hard can it be to take these two pieces apart? But the solution evaded me for such a long time. He rates it on par with the must-haves, and the appeal is the one minimalist puzzles always have: nothing is hidden and you still cannot do it. That principle is covered in minimalist puzzles.

Cast Horse, if you are buying for a beginner. One of the most classic designs in the series and probably one of the first puzzles I would give to a friend that doesn't know about puzzles. It has a brilliant trick and it is forgiving. For an experienced solver it is not a revelation; for a first Cast puzzle it is the right one.

What About the Famous Ones?

Cast Marble is reportedly one of the best-selling Hanayamas in the world. A bowl inside a frame that looks like a separate piece and is not, with what he calls a weird four-dimensional solving experience and a solution he rates highly.

Cast Diamond is one of very few he has solved more than twenty times, and the one he most enjoys handing to other people. It looks so easy. That gap between appearance and difficulty is the whole design.

Cast Square he rates partly on looks, and is upfront about it: elegant, minimalist, good colours. When a product is designed so tightly to look good and to make someone want to pick it up, then it makes the puzzle feel better for me. Not every ranking admits aesthetics count. This one does.

Cast Labyrinth is level four of six and the one he needed a break after discussing. Two mazes on opposite sides of the same piece, with misaligned pins on the other, which makes it a really trippy challenge. Hours before the right way of thinking arrived.

Which Hanayama Is Most Underrated?

Cast Hook, and the reasoning is specific rather than contrarian. It has smooth motions and unusual movement, which makes it as good to re-solve as to solve, and he tried several times after the first. He is also honest about why others dislike it: the fit, and some moves being awkward to execute.

Underrated in this hobby usually means hard. Here it means the pleasure is in how it moves, which is a quality piece count and difficulty ratings cannot capture.

Which Are the Hardest?

Cast Enigma is a level six that he rates among the hardest Hanayama has made, requiring a great many steps. Explaining the solution start to finish took him fifteen minutes, which is a better difficulty measure than the number on the box.

Cast Elk is the interesting case: a level five or six built from only two pieces, where the pieces themselves are complicated. Most hard puzzles get hard by adding parts. This one gets hard by making two parts strange, which he finds the more aesthetic approach.

Which Hanayama Puzzles Should You Skip?

Two, and the honesty about both is the reason to trust the rest of the list.

Cast Vortex got promoted mid-video. I used to say it's a horrible waste of metal, time and brain cells, but now I think it's just not the best. Still a skip, no longer an insult.

Cast Valve is the one worth reading carefully, because he does not actually think it is terrible. He needed to fill a gap in the tier board and said so out loud: I will sacrifice it to the gods of tier lists. His real objection is that it is a semi-blind puzzle where you cannot tell what is happening and intuit your way through, which he does not enjoy, but he explicitly refuses to put it in the bottom tier.

And Cast Donuts is the best example of the list correcting itself. He describes a hidden mechanism with a genuine surprise moment, says the solution is really good, and then talks himself out of it: I would say this is a must have Hanayama, but I do not think this is a must have Hanayama. I think the mechanism is a little clunky.

Which Hanayama Should You Buy First?

Cast Horse if it is your first mechanical puzzle of any kind. Cast Medallion if you already enjoy puzzles and want the one he rates highest. Cast DNA if the idea of being beaten by two pieces appeals.

Avoid starting with a level six. Cast Enigma and Cast Elk are excellent and they are not first purchases.

Hanayama puzzles are take-apart puzzles, mostly disentanglement, which is the family explained in puzzle box mechanisms and placed among the seven types in the guide to mechanical puzzles. If that family appeals, the closest thing on our own shelf is Hedgehog in a Cage, a genuine classic with a full walkthrough. We work in interlocking and packing puzzles instead, and the whole range is in mechanical puzzles.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best Hanayama puzzle?

Greg rates the Cast Medallion highest, calling it a must-have: a complex maze with elegant moves that he has solved more than ten times and can now complete in two minutes. The Cast DNA sits alongside it for a completely different reason, being only two pieces.

Which Hanayama puzzle should a beginner start with?

The Cast Horse. It is one of the most classic designs in the series, it has a brilliant trick, and it is the one Greg would hand to a friend who knows nothing about puzzles. Avoid starting at level six.

What is the hardest Hanayama puzzle?

Of the ones covered, the Cast Enigma. A level six that Greg rates among the hardest Hanayama has made, needing a great many steps; explaining the solution out loud took him fifteen minutes. The Cast Elk is the other contender, and gets its difficulty from only two pieces.

Are Hanayama puzzle difficulty levels accurate?

They tell you roughly how hard a puzzle is and nothing about whether it is good, which is the gap a tier list fills. The Cast Elk and Cast Enigma are both high level and very different experiences, and plenty of low-level Cast puzzles are more enjoyable than high-level ones.

Which Hanayama puzzles are not worth buying?

The Cast Vortex, which Greg downgraded from his bottom tier to simply not the best, and the Cast Valve, a semi-blind puzzle where you intuit your way through without understanding what is happening. He is open that the Valve was partly sacrificed to fill a gap in the tier board.

Does Greg Puzzles sell Hanayama puzzles?

No. We make 3D-printed interlocking and packing puzzles, which is a different part of the hobby, so nothing in this ranking is a recommendation of our own stock.