A Spirited Journey – Templars Cross

Templars Cross is as easy as Six Face (Little Nightmares – Six Face), the last Andrew Crowell Turning Interlocking Cube (TIC) that I did.  In other words, I found it difficult.  Six Face had a piece that just gave me problems.  Templars Cross gave me twins to deal with.  Beware the terrible twos(ome).  But let’s start at the beginning.

Templars Cross is a 5x5x5 TIC designed by Andrew Crowell.  The red outer shell encases a 3x3x3 white apparent cube.  Each side of the outer shell has 8 missing voxels basically giving you 6 red crosses on a white background.  Of the 6 pieces that comprise Templars Cross, 2 are mostly red and 4 are mostly white.

Creating the red outer shell is not difficult but adding the white pieces becomes progressively harder.  The first piece is a gimme with a gotcha.  However, the gotcha will be short-lived if you stumble across it.  That leaves 3 little pieces to go.  2 are all white and 1 has a single red cube.  And that single red cube will be your friend once you solve it.

You need to determine how to place the 3 white pieces to make a cube with the white pieces already in the frame.  And do it such that the single empty voxel is cached behind the red frame making the cube appear solid.  And do it so that the frame pieces can be put together.  Did I mention that those twins have to be rotated several times while all this is going on?

The twins are mirror images of each other and are the A and B Soma pieces.  One end of the A piece is red so that has to plug the missing spot in the frame.  Easy, right?  Not so much.  And with all those rotations going on, it gives you an extra opportunity to get the wrong end of the A piece sticking out.

It’s an effort to determine how the white pieces need to be oriented in the cube.  It’s a bigger effort to determine how the pieces need be oriented to get the cube apart.  It’s an even bigger effort to determine how to perform the rotations to go between the 2 orientations.  This is the part that I really struggled on.

After a couple of sessions with Templars Cross, I was beginning to understand the symbolic tie to martyrdom and sacrifice.  I finally decided to throw a Hail Mary and put the pieces in what I assumed was the starting configuration and closed it up.  The only thing to do now was to rotate the pieces until it was solved, taken back apart, or stuck.

Once the frame is closed and locked (yes, one of the pieces acts as a lock), the 2 halves of the frame only shift 1 voxel in either of 2 directions but not both.  It turns out that both are needed in the solution.  I was happy to discover that I had indeed correctly figured out the starting configuration and was able to perform the required rotations to achieve the solved state.  And I find it highly repeatable knowing how Rudolph needs to be oriented.