F In L – Eleven L’s Puzzle

I recently had the opportunity to acquire a copy of the Eleven L’s Puzzle on an auction site.  What caught my attention was that the Eleven L’s puzzle consists of 11 F pentominoes.  Although I couldn’t track down the designer of this puzzle, perhaps there is a language translation issue here regarding the use of F and L.  In any event, there are a bunch of F’s invading the Eleven L’s Puzzle, Dagnabbit!

The puzzle consists of 11 L’s (aka F pentominoes) and a box that is divided into 2 sections.  One side comes with 2 of the L’s and the other is the what in 9 L’s? side.  The goal is to pack all 11 L’s on one side of the box.  Being lazy, I picked the slightly larger side leaving the other side for someone else to solve.

To solve this puzzle, I was immediately struck with 2 ideas.  The first was that since the packing space was larger than the space required by the pieces, I was suspecting a Coffinesque packing solution.  The second was the odd number of pieces, 11.  This made me consider how 11 pieces could be packed together and I simplified the approach by looking at it as a circle packing problem.  This gave me an initial concept of location and piece orientation to work with.  And I have to confess that this was done before the puzzle arrived as part of an anticipatory solving approach.  Doesn’t everybody do this?

After it arrived and I spent a couple of minutes with it, I finally came to the conclusion that I was overthinking it and that perhaps it was a straight-forward cubic-dissection packing problem.  Or it could be a combination of multiple packing schemes.  Working between several potential packing arrangements, I finally managed to pack all the F’n L’s into one side of the box.  I won’t reveal the final packing configuration but the process involved the typical attempt to pack pieces as densely as possible without leaving major gaps and of course there was plenty of backtracking. 

If you want a go at it yourself, it is currently available at Creative Crafthouse if you’re interested in acquiring your own copy.  They have both this version and a fancier laser-cut version as well.