Better Than TV – Widescreen

More than a decade ago, I stopped paying for TV service to focus on other more important things.  Things like puzzling.  Dropping this service not only gave me more time to spend with puzzles but also left me with more funds to buy them.  At least that would be what I would tell me wife if I even dared to hint that she no longer had TV service so that I could buy more puzzles.  We’ve stopped going to the movies as well.  Apparently we were ahead of our time since everyone stopped going to the movies about 5 years ago.  Fortunately, I recently had the opportunity to appreciate watching things unfold within the ... Widescreen.

Widescreen is a 3D restricted-opening apparent-cube packing puzzle designed by Alexander Magyarics and made by Wood Wonders.  The pieces are made from Tauari and the box is made from Tigerwood with Avodire accents on the edges.  I love the look of the Tigerwood and the contrast with the Avodire edging makes it a stand-out eye-candy piece.

There is one large wide opening in box that also makes use of half-voxels.  These half-voxels prohibit the movement of pieces while at the same time forcing a piece to be located there to satisfy the apparent-cube requirement.

Shipping Configuration

The puzzle arrived with all the pieces within the box pretending to be a disassembly challenge.  However, the pieces did not make an apparent cube leaving a lot of the box opening unfilled.  All that was needed was to shuffle the pieces around a bit to fill that unfulfilled opening.  HaHaHaHa.

It doesn’t take a lot of effort to remove the pieces from the box in their unsolved shipping state.  Once the pieces are fully visible and fueled by the success of quickly liberating the pieces from the box, I immediately came to the conclusion that this was not going to be that difficult and it would be a quick solve.  BwaHaHaHaHa.  There are just some things that I will never, ever learn.

This puzzle definitely benefits from an approach that starts with determining what orientations the pieces can enter the box with.  This reduces the number of possible assemblies utilizing the 2 largest pieces, which can quickly be reduced to 2 main candidate assemblies.  However, both of these assemblies support several complete assemblies with the final piece added.  I ended up bouncing between these assemblies searching for one that would work with the box.  And even though, after experiencing many, so many, of these puzzles, and writing this over and over again, I doubted the assemblies that were providing several moves along a path and looked for other assemblies as I struggled to find that allusive solution.

Eventually, I found the one thing that I hadn’t tried and the solution unfolded in front of me.  And after a couple of attempts, I even manged to follow the sequence and get all the pieces within the box where they were supposed to be.

The 12 move dance to get that first piece out is terrific and it even took me few minutes the following day to liberate the pieces from the box again.  Just another great design from Alexander.