Cranial Conundrum – Skull Puzzle

It’s that time of year again when the weather gets cooler, the nights get darker, and monsters roam the land.  Yes, Halloween had finally arrived!  Having friends that eschew Christmas and go all out for Halloween, it was time to play dress up once again.  I already had a bad reputation for being a puzzler, so being able to don a mask and go in disguise was a definite benefit.  However, I quickly blew my cover by handing out little puzzles as if they were Halloween treats.  I’m hoping that scaring all those people counts as a win for a Halloween party.

I always like to bring the hosts a gift.  Usually something puzzley to go with the theme of instilling fear in the guests.  Most years I have a difficult time deciding what puzzle to bring but this this year I was lucky and popped one off the top of my head.  It was a skull dissected into 6 pieces that I encountered on Thingiverse.

Skull Puzzle was developed and made available by DaveMakesStuff on Thingiverse.  It consists of 6 burrish pieces with a difficulty level of 2, i.e., it takes 2 moves to remove the first piece.  It may not be a difficult puzzle but it has an amazing visual appeal.  And as amazing as it looked online, it was even more amazing once printed.

Normally, I like to deliver puzzles unassembled mainly because that’s how I like them.  However, in this case I delivered the Skull Puzzle assembled so that it could be enjoyed in all its glory during the party.  My plan was to take it apart before I left so that the hosts could enjoy solving it themselves.  But when the time came to leave, I didn’t have the heart to disassemble it, fearing that next year I would return to a fractured skull.  I needn’t have worried.

Much to my surprise, the very next day I received a message that they had solved the puzzle.  It also reminded me once again how the level of difficulty varies between people.  It took me a few minutes to assemble the puzzle but took two other people working together a long time to reassemble it once they had taken it apart.  And they considered it far from easy.  I won’t repeat the descriptive language that they used to describe their joy of the process.

I suspect that next year I may need a better disguise costume.