Barcode Burr

I’ve finally gotten around to playing with Barcode Burr and what an amazing design it is.  It consists of 6 mostly identical pieces that form a mostly complete cube.  Mostly identical, because the pins and mazes on each make them unique.  Mostly complete since there are grooves in the pieces.

Barcode Burr was developed by Lee Krasnow and was originally made in wood with metal pins.  Each piece had an identical pattern on the outward facing sides that meshed with the other pieces to provide an amazing pattern when the cube was assembled.  It was entered in the 2004 IPP Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition where it won an Honorable Mention award.  Stiff competition that year.

To provide a more economical means of providing puzzles like this to the puzzle community, Lee eventually created his own 3D fab lab to print his fabulous puzzles.  Not only was Barcode Burr made available but also other code burrs using the same overall format but different mazes.  There are now 17 different designs in the Barcode Burr family.

For these puzzles, each piece is comprised of 3 components.  There is the main body of the piece that makes up the outer shell of the cube and 2 other components that allow for customizing the maze and pin configurations.  One is a long protrusion that mounts to the main body and the other is a plate that mounts onto a shorter protrusion on the main body.  Each of these pieces supports interacting with an adjacent piece on 2 sides providing a total of 4 other pieces that each piece interacts with, i.e., all but one other piece.  Since pieces on opposite corners move along the same diagonal line, albeit in opposite directions, it is not possible to have them interact via a maze.

Not wanting to bite off more than I could chew, I decided to start with the rainbow colored Barcode Burr.  Why rainbow colored.  Because, I was a bit concerned that if all the pieces were the same color, it would be more difficult to determine where each piece goes and the order that they have to go together.  AND, there are 3 solutions with 2 being non-intended solutions with shorter solution paths.

To be honest, once I started playing with it, the colors and the expected movements took away any intimidation I had expected.  It was just fun.  I’ve taken it apart and put it back together several times just for the fun of it.  When the pieces start coming out, it does get a little fiddly but never falls apart.  At some point, I’m going to have to try the single color version and scramble the pieces to determine how difficult it is to solve.

As of now, Barcode Burr appears to still be available in Lee’s shop Pacific Puzzleworks if you want to get a copy of your own.  It’s well worth playing with.