Longer Than Expected - BonBon

 

I took advantage of the last Cubicdissection offering to acquire a copy of BonBon designed by Frederic Boucher.  I’m fortunate that CD is relatively close and I can receive the puzzles within a few days.  The puzzle was released on a Wednesday and CD indicated that the packages would be sent out by the end of the week.  A couple of days for shipping, a couple more for quarantining, a few minutes to solve, and I would have my blog entry for the following week!

To keep track of your puzzle purchases on a minute-to-minute basis, Cubidissection provides a tracking number.  I was able to see that my package was launched on its journey on Friday.  I was assured that it would be received by 8:00 PM on Wednesday, but I knew that it would be arriving earlier.  On Saturday, I was pleased to see that the package had left North Carolina at 4:00 in the morning and arrived in my home state, New Jersey, at 5:00 PM.  Right on track!  I should receive it Sunday, or Monday at the latest.  Sunday morning, I checked online to determine what time it would be arriving and saw instead that it had arrived in Georgia at 10:00 PM on Saturday night !?!

For those of you not familiar with East Coast USA, New Jersey is several hundred miles North of North Carolina and Georgia is several hundred miles south of North Carolina.  In one day, the package went from NC to NJ to GA for over 1000 miles, passing both me and CD twice.  At this point, the package was stuck swirling around Georgia while occasionally updating me that it had been received in a Georgia distribution center and that it was still on track to be delivered by 8:00 PM on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, one week after the release, the status changed to the dreaded: It’s going to be Late.  When they tell you it’s going to be on time, you assume that it’s going to be late.  When they admit that it’s going to be late, well …

Fortunately, I did receive the package on Thursday and dutifully put it in the quarantine pile for the next couple of days.  

Was it worth the wait?  Most definitely!  The Butternut box with acrylic top and Morado pieces are beautiful.  I really like the look of the Morado grain.  I also like that the puzzle comes unsolved and gives nothing away with the way that it is packed for shipping.

The objective of the puzzle is to put all 5 pieces completely inside the box.  It turns out that it is trivial to place all the pieces inside with a single cube hanging out but much more difficult to get them in without any hanging out.

The box has 4 openings that can be used to insert pieces and help move them around.  It’s not really a spoiler to say that pieces can only be inserted using 2 of them.  The 2 square openings are too small to support inserting any of the pieces.

The geometry of the box supports a variety of piece rotations, making the solve a lot of fun.  While figuring out how the pieces can be rotated within the box, I found some really cool rotations that weren’t required, but they were really … uh … Cool!  Definitely something to consider for a future puzzle.

Like the shipping, The solving process took longer than expected.  I spent about 2 hours figuring out how to pack those 5 simple looking pieces in the box.  Of course, I enjoyed every minute of it.  I do enjoy fiddling with these types of puzzles and trying various things before resorting to any serious thought process.  However, when you do give it a good think, everything just falls into place rather quickly.

Since I obviously couldn’t include a photo of the solved puzzle, I decided to quickly take a picture of it packed with all 5 pieces and 4 of them coming out of one of the holes.  It wasn’t as quick as I thought and was an interesting task.  Have fun with that one!  Spoiler shot of the erupting BonBon below.