How I Learned to Hate Myself - Licorice +-x

If you’re designing puzzles and your name is not being cursed, you’re doing something wrong. At least this is how I justify all those choice nicknames conferred upon me by my puzzle acquaintances.  Of course, as a puzzle collector myself, I completely understand the love/hate relationship with puzzle designers.  This is the story of how I closed that loop and learned to hate myself.

When I posted about Yukari’s Cube (A Puzzle with No Name – Yukari’s Cube), my good friend Tyler provided some information on research that he performed on the L tromino pieces used to pack a 3x3x3 cubic space.  A polyomino is a shape comprised of cubes (or squares in 2D) attached by their sides and a tromino is simply a polyomino comprised of 3 cubes.  There are 2 possible trominos: one with all the cubes in a row (the I piece) and one creating a corner (the L piece).

Tyler’s analysis was prompted by Roland Koch’s Trilogic puzzle designed in 2003.  Trilogic is comprised of 9 L trominos that make a cube with a checkered pattern on each side of the puzzle.  Roland’s website indicates that this puzzle is easy to moderate in difficulty.  Tyler indicated that the pieces reminded him of licorice.

Since the Trilogic cubes were made from layers of contrasting wood, there are multiple ways that the L trominos could be constructed to make different patterns.  Tyler discovered that due to the checkered pattern of Trilogic, there were only 3 possible constructions of the L trominos that would be valid for constructing the puzzle.

After reading Tyler’s comment, I was immediately inspired to devise the world’s most awesome 9-piece L tromino cube packing puzzle.  My objective was to find a pattern that would expand the number of tromino constructions that could be used.  Instead of starting with the design process, in my excitement, I started making the licorice cubes that would be glued together to make the trominos. 

It turned out that the dimensions that I used for the cube layers look very similar to those used for Trilogic.  This was completely unintentional.  I was originally going to make all the layers the same width, but since I was working with 3/4" stock in a non-metric country, each layer would have been 3/20”, which oddly enough, my 5-piece gauge block set can’t accomplish.  I ended up using 1/8”, 3/16”, 1/8”, 3/16”, 1/8” layers, which my gauge block set could handle. 

Each piece was individually made by gluing the 5 square layers together, sanding the cubes, beveling the edges, and then gluing the cubes together to form the L trominos.  Since the sanding was done somewhat aggressively by hand, the blocks only approximate cubic shapes but won’t hold up to close scrutiny.  This is not the ideal way to make these cubes and is only sufficient to quickly make a prototype for testing.  If you were going to make a large quantity of these, you would probably want to make a nice sheet of 5-layer plywood and then cut it down into cubes.  Unfortunately, I don’t have the equipment for that so I end up using 3/4" x 3/4" red oak and poplar sticks from the local home improvement centers and then chopping them up using a miter saw.

After completing the required 27 cubes needed for the 3x3x3 packing puzzle, they sat around for months waiting for that brilliant design to burst forth from the void.  Try as I might, I couldn’t come up with an interesting pattern that was different from the Trilogic checkerboard pattern that would yield an interesting puzzle.  Interesting being defined as a pleasing pattern for the assembled cube and a unique solution.  Oh, and it would be nice if all the pieces were different.

After a short diversion to work on another puzzle design, the +-x pattern came to mind and I set about testing this pattern and designing the L tromino pieces to make it.  The resulting 9 puzzle pieces consist of 3 sets of duplicate pieces and 3 unique pieces.  The completed cube has a +, -, or x on 3 sides of the cube with the same symbols on the opposite sides.  The puzzle has 2 solutions. 

Now comes the most difficult part of this tale to tell.  I have not been able to solve it.  In fact, nobody in my family has been able to solve it.  Unfortunately, everyone in my home hates the designer of this puzzle including me.  Well, actually my grandson likes to make a cube of the 9 pieces (ignoring the objective pattern) and thinks that we are all crybabies.

Wrong Top Front Corner!

It’s sooooooooo frustrating!  I really can’t recommend it.  It sits on the dining room table and taunts us daily.  I was really close once, where everything was correct except the center of one of the x’s was turned the wrong way.  In fact, we have managed several times to get to the point where 1 cube (center, edge, or corner) is rotated the wrong way.  My wife even managed to build the cube with 2 x’s, 1 +, and 3 -‘s.  Everything, but the objective pattern.  And before you ask, yes, I did check the pieces to ensure that they were correct.  BurrTools has no problem solving it.

Although we are having a problem finding a solution, I know that Tyler will come up with a way to analyze the pieces and derive the solution without trial and error.

This Puzzle’s No Turkey - It’s Chicken

Sometimes when you’re looking for a brilliant puzzle, you end up with a Turkey.  The Chicken puzzle by Olexandre Kapkan, however, is no turkey.  It was made by Eric Fuller at Cubicdissection in 2015 and released in April, which I guess makes it a spring chicken.

Chicken is comprised of 2 legs, a neck, a tail, and the breast.  It also has 2 holes drilled for the eyes and Eric also stuck the drill bit up somewhere else that we’ll discuss later.  It’s obvious that special care went into selecting the woods to represent white meat and dark meat.  The white meat was made from Yellowheart and the dark meat was made from Cherry.  Eric also took extra measures in the joinery of the pieces to make very strong bonds.

Chicken is a level 10.2 puzzle with the objective to dismember it and then stuff everything back in.  The puzzle is not difficult but the movements required to get all the pieces intertwined within the body are interesting.  After a couple of moves you can start to see inside the body and work out how the pieces need to be manipulated.  Basically, after you move the tail you can get a good look up the chicken’s … uh, you get the point.  A lot of fun for a relaxing sitting.

Word went out late that the chicken was primed to dump a heap of trouble upon the recipients.  It looks like a normal puzzle butt it was designed so that when you pull the tail, you got an extra little surprise that falls out.  In my case, the “extra bonus” probably went in the trash with the packing peanuts since this was in the pre-orange box/sack days when puzzles were swimming au natural in Styrofoam peanuts when they arrived.  However, just the thought of Eric hunched over shaping individual artisanal turds still elicits a smile.

Making burr puzzles in the shapes of animals was obviously a hit with Eric since he hasn’t made one since.  Perhaps too many customers cried fowl.  For craftsman level puzzles, animal shapes seem to be more popular with puzzle boxes and sequential discovery puzzles.  It is also seen more with commercially produced puzzles where the shape is probably more of an enticement than the puzzle aspect.

Happy Thanksgiving and take some time to enjoy a puzzle!

Monkey Business - HepTIC

It’s time to put the monkey back in his cage.  We manage to get him inside but his head is sticking out of the side.  After pushing his head in, we notice that he is not comfortable, so we turn him around.  But now his head is sticking out of the front of the cage.  We rock him back into a seated position and make him sit down.  Good monkey!  We place a banana in his lap, and while he is calming down, start to close the cage.  The door ends up right against the banana so we move it to the side.  The now, not so happy monkey, throws the banana, which proceeds to roll on the floor.  As we were closing the door, we pick up the banana and give it back to the monkey as the door clicks shut.

Spoiler Alert!  The prior paragraph is my wife’s solution to HepTIC designed by Andrew Crowell.  As I mentioned in a prior post (5 Is the Magic Number - PenTIC), my wife likes to create stories to remember the solutions to puzzles.  Each piece becomes a character in a thrilling plot with many twists and turns.  Monkey Business is now the official HepTIC solution.  So if anyone asks you how to solve it, you can send them a copy.

My version of HepTIC was beautifully made with exotic woods by Andrew himself.  It is definitely more fun than a barrel of monkeys.  It consists of 4 pieces: cage, monkey, banana, and door.  However, I’m not quite sure why Andrew didn’t use the Yellowheart for the banana.

HepTIC is part of Andrew’s Turning Interlocking Cube (TIC) series with a rating of 7.1.5 and requiring 3 rotations.  According to my wife, the monkey is a wiggler, which accounts for most of the rotations required to get that monkey off your back and into the cage.  Andrew rates this puzzle as having a medium level of difficulty for assembling.  You should definitely attack this zoologist conundrum as an assembly task and not as a disassembly effort.  Letting the monkey out is a lot easier than getting him back in the cage.

A New Spin on Puzzling - Tetra Spinner

“That’s a novel take on packing tetrominoes”.  That was my initial thought when I saw Tetra Spinner while perusing the IPP39 Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition entries.  I was intrigued and looking forward to trying it.

Tetra Spinner was designed by Yasuhiro Hashimoto and Mineyuki Uyematsu and was one of the top ten vote getters in the competition.  I got my chance to try it at the Rochester Puzzle Picnic (A Decade of Puzzling - RPP 2019).

It’s made from plexiglass and consists of a frame and all 5 tetrominoes (i.e., the free ones and not the extra 2 one-sided ones).  Tetrominoe is just a fancy name for a connected shape made from 4 squares in a plane.  Each of the tetrominoes in Tetra Spinner is a different color making it an eye catcher.  However, it’s the frame that gives this puzzle it’s unique appeal.  The frame is comprised of 3 layers of plexiglass.  The outer 2 layers are clear and bolted together through the center.  There is a spacer in the middle around the bolt to keep the two outer layers apart.  The middle layer has the same dimensions as the outer layer but most of the interior has been removed to make room for the tetrominoes.  The center layer can be moved and rotated around the middle but is restricted by the spacer holding the outer pieces.

The objective is to place the five tetrominoe pieces in the middle layer so that the middle layer is centered within the puzzle.  This requires that you move the white plexiglass frame as far as it will go so that you can add pieces to the empty areas that now hang outside the outer layers.  However, the more pieces that you add, the more difficult it is to move the frame of the middle layer.  This requires determining where the pieces need to go within the frame and the order that they need to be added.  Oh, and while you’re doing that, you need to determine how the pieces and frame need to be moved around to accomplish all that.

I didn’t find this puzzle difficult but it was fun to solve.  I didn’t include the photo of the puzzle in the solved state, since it would give away part of the solving process.  It would certainly give away the first piece that would be removed although this should become obvious rather quickly in the solving process.  Yes, that was a hint, but I’m sure you were already thinking about it.  It’s only cheating if you go back 2 sentences and reread it to understand it.

S,Z,J,and L Tetrominoes

Before concluding, I feel compelled to explain the reference to free tetrominoes to save readers the embarrassment of getting caught leaving the puzzle store without paying for tetrominoe related puzzles.  There are 5 tetrominoes if you regard the pieces irrespective of orientation.  These are referred to as free tetrominoes.  There are 7 tetrominoe shapes if you are not allowed to turn them over.  These are referred to as one-sided tetrominoes.  The difference between the free tetrominoes and the one-sided tetrominoes is due to the 2 pieces that can be flipped over to provide a different shape; the S piece becomes the Z piece and the J piece becomes the L piece.

Yanked My Chain - Chain Store

Sometimes a puzzle just yanks your chain, which is exactly what happened with Chain Store.

One of the joys of attending the International Puzzle Party is spending time playing with the entries in the Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition.  This is a puzzling wonderland full of all sorts of new designs for a wide variety of puzzle types.  There is something for everyone and I try to spend as much time as possible in the design competition room socializing with other puzzlers doing the same.

One entry in the IPP36 Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition was Chain store, designed by Goh Pit Khiam.  It was made by master craftsman Tom Lensch and won the Jury Honorable Mention award.

I looked at it and said to myself, how difficult could it be to put a 5-link chain in a box?  Apparently, 5 links are plenty sufficient to provide all sorts of awkward positioning to frustrate the packing process.  The links are 4x6 allowing the width of the link to just fit inside another link.  And then what about the box?  Do the links go in orthogonally or do they end up at an angle?  I spent a lot of time hypothesizing how the links would sit within the box and then trying to orient the links in the direction that I needed.  It turns out that turning links made from square material takes more forethought and planning than links made from cylindrical stock.  In the end, it took more of an effort than I could muster in the design competition room.

Now I have a question for you.  Would you rather buy a puzzle that you have already solved or that puzzle that you didn’t quit manage to solve?  Personally, I tend to buy puzzles that I haven’t solved.  Once I’ve solve a puzzle, I’ve basically scratched that itch.  Of course, some puzzles are so brilliant you need to acquire a copy even after solving them to occasionally wonder at and show others.  Case in point is Stumbling Blocks also by Goh Pit Khiam, and a top 10 vote getter in the IPP36 design competition.  I solved Stumbling Blocks very quickly but the movement is so spectacular, I needed to acquire a copy.

When I saw Tom Lensch at the following Rochester Puzzle Picnic, I made sure to acquire a copy of Chain Store as well as Stumbling Blocks.  After returning home, I played with Chain Store attempting to get all 5 of those links inside the box without peaking over the lip at the top.  I had heard that an earlier version of the box was slightly bigger and that it allowed an alternate solution.  While I was working on Chain Store, there were several times that I wished that I had the original box.

At some point, the chain was sufficiently yanked to turn the light bulb on and I managed to stuff those stubborn links into that wee little box.  Once I discovered the required orientation for the links, I found that there is an elegant way to crumple up the chain to pack in the box.

I really liked this puzzle and if you are interested in acquiring a copy, Cubicdissection is planning on releasing a run in the near future.

Off With Her Head! Part 2 - Skull

Not long ago, I reviewed Guillotine, which posed the threat: Off With Her Head!  This review picks up where that one left off and addresses the aftermath of the successful execution of that task. 


It’s frightening how many pieces there are to this crushed Skull - 48 in total.  It’s almost like a puzzle!  In the post on Puzzle Complexity, the number of pieces was offered as a potential indicator of difficulty.  However, a counter example of jigsaw puzzles was offered as a case where the level of difficulty may not increase exponentially with piece count.  This is the case with the Skull puzzle, where you can determine from examining the pieces that it is essentially a 3D jigsaw puzzle.  Not only is it a 3D jigsaw puzzle, but all the pieces are edge pieces.  Armed with this information, I figured that this would be a piece of cake and jumped right into the pile.  This is how all horror movies start - bright smiles and lot of optimism!


In no time at all, I had discovered the key piece.  This was largely accomplished by the fact that it had “KEY” stamped on it.  However, I was haunted by the thought that I didn’t know what to do with it as I was assembling the puzzle.  I failed to notice that the back of the box had “Skull Assembly Hints” that indicated exactly what needed to be done with the key piece.  My recommendation is to try to avoid the hint and discover it yourself.  You’ll certainly figure it out in less time than I did.


The fact that the pieces are clear with no drawings or patterns means that you are putting the pieces together by shape and being a skull, there are no easily recognizable ear, eye, or nose shapes to look for.  I also avoided looking at the picture on the box for any clues.  Yes, it was bit intimidating to find a starting point amongst all those ghostly pieces.  In the end, I ended up working from both ends and ended with sandwiching the 2 end assemblies together. Once I had the process underway, it was not that difficult to construct the Skull.


It should come as no surprise that the Skull has quite a bit of empty space between where the ears should be when fully assembled.  You could add something inside … like … maybe … a small battery and some LEDs and/or a little sound generator?  What would Chinny do? 


Skull is one of the Original 3D Crystal Puzzles from BePuzzled and has a difficulty rating of 2 out of 3.  It is available from Puzzle Master in black like I have or red.  Double check your order before buying or you may end up with something you didn’t expect like me when I tried to purchase a Puzzle Skill.

Happy Halloween and take some time to enjoy a spooky puzzle!

Molnar Scores Again! - Hat Trick

A hat trick in sports is a reference to 3 of something.  When I was a kid, my folks used to watch hockey, so I was brought up to recognize a hat trick as 3 goals scored by a player in a game.  Other sports have similar definitions of a hat trick.  I’m sticking with hockey since Hat Trick, the puzzle, obviously has 6 hockey sticks (one for each player on a hockey team) with a goal - of packing them all in the restricted opening box.

Hat trick was designed by Laszlo Molnar and entered in the IPP39 Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition where it was one of the top 10 vote getters.  When the competition entries were originally announced, I was intrigued by this puzzle and attempted to solve this puzzle as a mental exercise without having a physical copy.  I finally encountered a copy at the Rochester Puzzle Picnic (A Decade of Puzzling - RPP 2019).  Brian Menold from Wood Wonders brought several copies to RPP in a variety of different woods.  They were so beautiful, I ended up taking one with an Orange Agate box and Redheart pieces home with me.  I particularly like the look of the Redheart corners on the Orange Agate box.

So, what is Hat Trick all about?  It consists 6 hockey sticks or if you prefer, you can just think of them as L shaped pieces that are 3x2x1.  These hockey sticks can be stored in the accompanying box that has an interior space of 2x3x4.  The only problem is that someone made the opening in the storage box too small to simply dump the hockey sticks in.  It only has a small T-shaped opening in the top.  This type of faulty craftsmanship turns an easy job into a complex process, or what we fondly call: a puzzle.

Once I had a physical copy, I was able to verify the solution that I had envisioned when viewing the puzzle competition design entry listing.  The solving process for this puzzle is fairly straight-forward.  Since this is a fully packed restricted opening box with 6 identical pieces, it is obvious where the last piece in (or first piece out) is located.  With that information, there aren’t too many 2x3x4 assemblies left to check.  It becomes obvious early on that rotations are required to insert and manipulate the pieces.  Understanding the possible rotations that can be made is the key to achieving the required assembly.

Compared to other recent packing puzzle designs, I found this one to be on the easier side.  It would make a nice challenge for a new puzzler.  The key movement required to orient the pieces is clever and provides a very nice Aha moment.

Hat Trick is currently sold out on Wood Wonders but it’s possible that it may show up again.