Flattenry Will Get You Nowhere – Soma Tray

Over the last several years, the Soma Cube developed by Piet Hein has suffered a lot of abuse.  Since the 7 pieces forming a cube has 480 solutions, various tortuous methods have been employed to jettison 479 of them leaving the puzzle with a unique solution.  One of these time-honored methods is to squash it.  This involves picking one of the 480 (or maybe more appropriately 240 to avoid the mirror) solutions and scaling it down along one of it’s 3 dimensions.  To be quite honest, I do not know if every combination results in a unique solution but I’ve always assumed that squashing the Soma cube is a uniquifying process.

Soma Tray was designed by Rick Eason in 2016 and used as his exchange puzzle at the 41st International Puzzle Party in 2025, suggesting it sat on the shelf for 9 years.  In fact, it looks like it was buried on a shelf resulting in a somewhat flattened appearance.  OK, a very flatted appearance.  My guess is that it’s flattened shape under a heap of other puzzle prototypes had doomed it from seeing the world.  However, as we now know, it successfully escaped and made itself know. 

The puzzle consists of the 7 squashed Soma pieces with 1 dimension about a quarter of the size of the other 2.  All the pieces are flat with 5 of them having a single squashed cube added on top.  As the name of the puzzle would indicate, there is also a tray.  The tray is 5x3x2 with the 2-layer Z dimension representing the flattened dimension.  There is also a 1x3x1 shape affixed to the bottom of the tray, 1 unit from the end.  This provides a 2-layer 3x3 area on the left and 1x3 area on the right.  Both the pieces and the tray are made from laser-cut veneered wood.  The tray also has the name of the puzzle as well as additional information debossed along the rim of the tray.

Soma Tray comes with 2 challenges.  The first is to build a typical, albeit squashed, Soma in the 3x3 area of the tray.  I’m assuming that this is a uniquified Soma cube but I didn’t verify that.  The second challenge is to fill the tray with all 7 pieces.

The puzzle arrives nicely packed in the tray except for a single square sticking up from the tray.  Needless to say, filling the tray is not achieved by simply flipping that piece over.  Since the tray arrives with 1 piece sticking out, I obviously wanted to fix it and started with the second challenge.  I immediately dumped the pieces out to start with a clean state and embark on fixing the problem.  I know I said that you couldn’t just flip over that one piece in the original packing state to solve it but honestly, I just assumed that.  Maybe the joke is on me.

Since the right side of the tray limited that pieces that could be placed there, that’s where I started.  This definitely turned out the way to go as the spillover into the 3x3 side helped put the final pieces in place there.  I should also note that I solved it a second time and ended up with the a mirror image of the first solution.

Having completed the first, or technically, the second challenge, I proceeded to work on creating a squashed cube.  After some random attempts, I decided to think about the relationship between the pieces with and without the extra cube.  This gave the direction that I needed and soon after, I had a squashed cube nestled in the tray.  Since the other challenge had a mirror solution, I checked the cube as well and sure enough, the solution to this challenge had one as well.

Soma Tray is not a difficult puzzle but I did enjoy the challenges.  I also like how the pieces store in the tray.  And you can never have enough Soma variants.