Nothing Yet Designs Release: 20 March 2025, 12:00 PM EDT

The next puzzle release from Nothing Yet Designs (NYD) will take place this coming Thursday, 20 March 2025 at 12:00 PM EDT.  Don’t forget to put it on your calendar and set your alarm.

I recently received a box full of puzzles nicely wrapped in NYD’s signature packaging.  Opening a box full of new puzzles never gets old.  This particular box contained the 14 puzzles for this month’s release featuring designs by Frederic Boucher, Stewart Coffin, Haym Hirsh, Nan Ma, Naoyuki Iwase (Osho), Gilles  Kutten, and Alexander Magyarics.  14 puzzles!  That’s a lot of puzzling!  But take advantage of it since NYD has announced that this will be the last big release for the foreseeable future.  Subsequent releases are anticipated to be much smaller.

Like the prior releases, this release consists of a variety of puzzle types and after having played with them for several days, it’s now time to share these puzzles with you.

Minima Dice – Frederic Boucher

Minima Dice was designed by Frederic Boucher and is this month’s puzzle from the Minima series.  It is made with a sparkly black 3D printed box with the name in gold and ….. wait for it ….. Dice!  I have to say that it’s a nice touch to use dice to make Minima Dice and the dice chosen look awesome!  NYD went all out to provide the nicest dice that I’ve seen for this puzzle.  The dice come in a variety of colors and they will be shipped randomly.


After marveling at the nice dice, you will notice that Minima Dice is sticking it’s tongue out at you and just daring you to put it back in it’s place.  This dice sticking out of the box is your clue that the puzzle is not solved.  When solved, all the dice are nicely packed inside.  The next thing that you’ll notice is that the dice sticking out doesn’t fall out because it appears to be stuck to the dice behind it.  After some experimenting, you discover that some of the dice have indeed been glued together and some of them can’t even be removed from the box.

With some dice in hand and others stuck in the box, you can see where the external ones would fit but it doesn’t quite seem possible to get them there.  And thus begins the journey.  The journey of nothing seems possible until all of a sudden you discover something and you start to move forward again.  After a few rounds of this, Minima Dice will not longer be sticking it’s tongue out at you and you’ll have a compliant and nicely packed box.

I have to stress that there is not reason to stress the pieces.  Everything move nicely without any force whatsoever.

Drop Out (STC202) – Stewart Coffin

NYD has received permission from Stewart Coffin to produce puzzles based on his designs.  I was always under the impression that Stewart’s designs were in the public domain but this turns out to be an untrue rumor that has spread throughout the puzzle community for decades.  It was disclosed in a recent Mechanical Puzzle Discord (MPD) discussion that it was verified with Stewart that this was indeed not true and permission needs to be granted to produce puzzles based on his designs.  Lucky for us, NYD has obtained permission to provide these classic gems.

Drop Out is a 2D sliding puzzle with a dark side.  It looks simple enough – a 4x3 closed top tray with 5 pieces trapped inside and one outside that can be added through a hole in the top.  The 5 trapped pieces consist of 1 square and 4 dominoes.  The free piece is a disk that we’ll call a puck.  The goal is to add the puck to the tray through the entrance hole in the top and manipulate it and the pieces until it ends up on the other side of the tray.  There is an exit hole on the bottom of the other side of the tray that will release the puck on arrival.

After demonstrating this remarkable feat of puzzle prowess to your friends, your next goal is to challenge them to solve the puzzle as well.  Sadly, they will not be able to repeat your amazing accomplishment, whereupon you can collect your winnings.

When Stewart Coffin initially developed this puzzle, he discovered that after the puck traversed the tray, the other pieces were left in a state that was unsolvable if you immediately put the puck back in at the starting point.  It takes a quick 8-move reset of the pieces to get them back into a solvable state or you could take the longer 26-move route and put the puck in through the bottom and reverse the path.  The move counts that I offer here are from Stewart’s Geometric Puzzle Design book as Ï’m not certain how sliding moves are counted.

Drop Out is made with exotic wood pieces and a laser-cut acrylic tray.  The tray is white with a clear acrylic top to track the movements inside.  There is also a finger hole in the center of the top to help manipulate the pieces in the tray.  I definitely made use of the finger hole as well as the entrance and exit holes to aid the movement or non-movement of pieces.  And it’s small size makes it easy to carry in your pocket so that you can take it with you to torment entertain your friends.

The Rattle – Stewart Coffin

I first encountered The Rattle in 2012 when I had the opportunity to buy one from Eric Fuller at the 32nd International Puzzle Party (IPP).  I enjoyed the puzzle immensely and am happy to see that NYD is now making it available for people in the puzzle community that have yet to experience it.

This classic 3D restricted opening packing puzzle was the genius of Stewart Coffin who conceived it decades before restricted opening packing puzzles became the rage.  The objective is to pack 8 pieces in a 4x4x2 box with a 1x2 opening.  To help get you going, 1 of the pieces is already in the box.  That is to say, it is not possible to remove the smallest piece from the box.  Hence the name – The Rattle.  Unless it was named after the frustration induced vigorous shaking you will inevitably succumb to.

The pieces are made from exotic woods and the box from clear frosted acrylic with the puzzle information debossed on the inside to keep the outside nice and smooth.  The tolerances are spot on and the pieces move very smoothly within the puzzle.  It initially looks intimidating with 8 pieces, but you quickly realize that none of the 7 free pieces can lay down on the job after entering the box and the trapped piece is just not a stand-up guy.  These restrictions limit the orientations of the pieces and make the solution very tractable.

The solution entails a sequence of inserting, moving, and rotating pieces to get them in position.  And yes, you will be rattling the puzzle to get those pieces in position since your only finger hole is the piece entrance.  Although it’s not a stated rule, try solving it without sticking your finger inside.

When you’re done and if you can get the pieces back out, try finding the other 5 solutions.  They are all closely related but 2 of them require a little more effort.  Rattle on!

Decoy – Stewart Coffin

The Decoy (STC 187A) is one of Stewart Coffin’s most difficult 2D restricted opening packing puzzles if not the most difficult.  NYD is now making this challenging puzzle available in laser-cut acrylic with a nice black tray and clear cover and light blue pieces.  The color contrast looks great!

I took a well disciplined approach to solving this one (after several undisciplined approaches of course).  On careful inspection, I discovered that there were 2 openings in the top of the frame.   After some deep analysis, I deduced that one can support adding 2 of the pieces and the other can support adding all of the pieces.  Some carefully executed experimentation revealed that one of the pieces is trouble with a capital T.  This piece just doesn’t want to be part of the solution.  It complains no matter where you try to put it.  And just when you think you’ve outsmarted it, it has the last laugh by getting in the way of all the other pieces.

After working on this puzzle for quite a while, I was beginning to wonder if the name was implying that it wasn’t really a solvable puzzle but just something to distract me from the real puzzles.

Eventually, I found an assembly where 3 pieces could be removed, but the other 3 were stuck.  But they were so tantalizingly close to being unstuckable!  Surely, this was due to a manufacturing glitch and not my superior solving prowess.  Stewart’s notes on this puzzle do indicate that the frame needs to be slightly oversized or the pieces rounded to support rotations.  His AP-ART compendium also has the solution but I refuse to look at solutions.  Of course I have a large backlog of unsolved puzzles as a result.

In the end, I discovered the secret to the secret sauce and was able to pack all the pieces in the frame.  And no, the secret is not to unscrew the cover.  It may look simple but it packs a really nice challenge.

Pac Men? – Naoyuki Iwase (Osho)

Last month’s release (Nothing Yet Designs Release: 7 February 2025, 12:00 PM EST) included some nice designs by Naoyuki Iwase (Osho) - Sliding Heart and Flying Heart.  This month’s release includes 3 packing puzzles designed by Osho.  The first of these, Pac Men?, is a 2D packing puzzle made from laser-cut acrylic.  It features a black tray with yellow pieces and matching yellow highlights.  The 7 pieces include: 2 happy Pac Men, one hungrier than the other, and 5 sets of conjoined twins.  Each twin is the result of a Pac Man that has another Pac Man attached on the bottom in all 5 possible rotations.  The goal is to pack all these Pac Men within a 2D tray.  This puzzle looks so amazing they should make a video game from it.

The goal is to have all the packed Pac Men facing up, or face down if you don’t want them staring at you as you push them around.  Why do these Pac Men only have eyes on one side of their heads?  It’s to force a single solution.  There are other solutions to be had if you ignore the eye orientation restriction.  Yes, you can easily turn over the symmetric pieces but you get the gist of it.   And no, I don’t know how many there are.  Could be dozens, could be 1.

It doesn’t take long to realize that this is not a trivial 2D packer.  I spent hours solving this one.  I ran across several promising configurations that only served to hinder progress.  Once you find a nice compact configuration of pieces, you are loathed to give it up.  Yet give it up I did.  Several times.  Not that I didn’t go back to them on occasion.  Eventually, I found myself on the right track and managed to swap and move pieces around to finally arrive at the destination with 12 packed eyes glaring at me.  And I have to admit, it is definitely not obvious and I can see why it is so difficult to find.  Once you’ve solved it yourself, just should spend some time analyzing the piece configurations to appreciate how well they divert you from finding the solution.  It’s really good.

While solving Pac Men? I was half expecting to end up in a situation that required me to flip over a piece to fill a spot to complete the packing but this never occurred.  So now I have left, the challenge of finding at least one mixed cyclopian solution.

Bast-Hedron 8 – Nan Ma

For this month’s release, we get to welcome another member to the Blast-Hedron (BH) family.  So far we’ve had BH4, BH6, and BH12.  And now we have BH8 from Nan Ma.  Like BH4, BH8 is a Coordinate Motion (CM) puzzle that forms a regular octahedron from identically shaped pieces.  However, BH8 consists of 8 pieces - twice the number of BH4.  And it forms a rather special regular octahedron.  Each piece is an equilateral triangle with a triangular window in the center and arms extending up from each of the three sides.  Don’t leave these laying around on the floor if you walk around without shoes in the house.

Each of the 8 triangular pieces forms one of the 8 sides of the octahedron and borders 3 other pieces.  And the arms extend through the octahedron to eventually become visible in the windows of the 3 neighboring pieces while displaying a portion of each of the 3 neighboring pieces in its own window.  

If you think that BH8 is more difficult than BH4 or BH6, you would be right.  If you think that BH8 is easier than BH12, there you would be wrong, very wrong, soooo wrong!  It may be easy to determine how the colors need to be arranged, but assembling this one is a real challenge!

The goal is to assemble the octahedron so that no adjacent triangles should be the same color.   BH8 was 3D printed using 4 colors providing 2 pieces with each color.  This results in an octahedron where each side shows all 4 colors, 1 for the triangular side and the other 3 for the neighboring arms that show in the center window.  However, if you manage to get it back together and find that the color scheme is a bit off, my guess is that you will eventually get used to it.

I struggled for a while trying to find the best way to juggle 8 pieces.  Add pieces individually?, in pairs?, by halves?…  The problem with this one is that BH8 seems to be very particular about getting all those points lined up just right before they allow the pieces to collapse inward.  I spent a considerable amount of time determining how all the pieces need to be aligned, which just highlights how difficult it is to get things together.  Luckily, when you get enough pieces together, even though it won’t collapse inward if things aren’t perfectly aligned, it does a good job of not collapsing outward either, allowing you to locate misalignments and adjust them.

This one’s my favorite from the BH family so far.  Complex, difficult, and attractive.

Pyramid In A Cage – Naoyuki Iwase (Osho)

Ah, this one brings back fond memories.  I think I had one of these when I was a little kid, but the goal was to put the pieces in the box instead of taking them out.  At least I think it was something like this.  Unlike the one I had as a kid, the shape inside doesn’t seem to match any of the openings.  Not a good sign.

Pyramid in a Cage is made with laser-cut matte black acrylic cage and contains a dark blue 3D printed pyramid.  This particular puzzle is not to make a pyramid but to free it from it’s cage.  Instead of being made with bars, this particular cage has some pretty large openings, 1 per side, and you need to determine which opening is suitable to pass the pyramid.  Let’s call them Hexagon, Phillips Screw Head, Ninja Star, Piece of Pie, Teardrop, and UFO.  Note that none of them is a triangle to match the profile of the pyramid.  To be clear, the pyramid is a regular tetrahedron.  And no, you can’t blast it out of there.

If the pyramid were outside the cage, you would be able to take it into a dark room and use a flashlight to see what types of profile shapes it would make in different orientations.  You could then use that information to match it to one of the opening shapes.  Or could you?

When it arrived, I decided that attempting to solve it by looking at the shapes without testing each one was the way to start on this one.  I even enticed my wife to join me so that we could each come up with our own guess and discuss the shapes.  We each provided our top 2 guesses and even overlapped on one of the shapes.  Thus we had 50% of the shapes covered.

Giving myself the best opportunity to gloat over the eventual win, we started with the one that only she picked.  Nope.  The one we both picked?  Nope.  Next up was my first choice and obvious winner.  Nope!  The next 2?  Nope, nope.  At this point we’d tried 5 of the 6!  It couldn’t be that last one!  Yup.  This one is really clever!  Not difficult to solve but well hidden and clever!

Best Friends – Frederic Boucher

Best Friends is a 2D packing puzzle designed by Frederic Boucher.  It was made from laser-cut acrylic with a green tray, black cats, and white dogs.  Each piece consists of a conjoined cat and dog.  The pieces consist of 9 paired best friends and 2 round treats.

The pieces only have faces debossed on one side so you don’t have to worry about which way to flip them.  And the pieces are thick giving them a very nice tactile feel.  They are a real pleasure to handle when solving this puzzle.

After working on Pac Men?, you just know this one’s going to be hard.  Are the pieces going to fight like cats and dogs?  Duhhhhh.  But even so, I didn’t find this one nearly as difficult as Pac Men?.  I found the solution rather quickly and attribute this to the fact that the tray is nearly completely filled making it easier to solve.  I say nearly since I don’t count the 2 spaces occupied by the treats since they can basically go anywhere or more specifically, in the 2 empty spaces after you’ve added all the friends.  Remember how we said that adding 2 single voxel pieces to Animals Party to fill the 2 empty spaces wouldn’t make it any easier to solve (Nothing Yet Designs Release: 7 February 2025, 12:00 PM EST).

This is a very friendly puzzle that looks amazing, feels amazing, and is a nice challenge that isn’t amazingly difficult to solve.

S&L Crisis – Haym Hirsh

Who knew that we would have an S&L Crisis so early in the new administration.  This particular crises comes to us thanks to Haym Hirsh.  Some puzzle are scary enough but with a name like S&L Crisis, that’s just over the top.

S&L Crisis is a 3D packing puzzle consisting of a green 3D printed stand and 6 dark brown 3D printed pieces that need to be packed within the stand.  Each of the pieces is identical, fits within a 3x3x5 space, and appears as an S when viewed along one axis and an L when viewed along another.  When packed, the pieces fit within a 5x5x5 space.  The stand has 3 sides of a 5x5x5 cube and stands (as stands do) on one corner to cradle the pieces.  There are also 4 fixed cubes in the bottom corner to force a single solution to the packing problem.

Looking at this puzzle, you just know it’s going to be easy!  Fairly simple looking pieces.  All identical.  Fits a cubic area.  Probably has a symmetric solution.  Nothing to worry about!  And that’s how I set myself up for my very own puzzle solving confidence crisis.  I couldn’t solve this simple looking puzzle!

Starting out rather cocky, I decided that I would simply take the 6 pieces and make a cube without the assistance of the stand.  In the back of my mind, I viewed the stand as a potential trap to lead novice puzzlers away from finding the solution.  So I set about to quickly make a cube, identify the holey corner, and place it in the stand.  What a great plan!  Except I couldn’t make a cube.  How embarrassing!

I spent a long time shuffling pieces around only to be astounded at how difficult it was to pack them together.  I was even starting to be happy when I achieved a 5 piece cube.  That 6th piece would just not go in.  And since they were all identical, it was hard to pin that culprit down.  They all seemed to be conspiring against me.

In the end, which really wasn’t the end, I finally had a 6 piece cube.  But none of the corners was holey enough.  It needed to be holier than holey and my temporary confidence boost completely deflated.  After several more attempts at this, I decided to go with clever rather than cocky and use the stand to develop a holey procession of pieces whereby I would build the cube around the required corner.  This is automatically supported by the 4 cubes fixed in the bottom of the stand.

And let me tell you about my success.  There was none!  Instead of creating incompatible cubes, I could only create cubes with 5 pieces in the stand (without having pieces stick out, which was beginning to look rather attractive by the way).  I created several 5 piece cubes in the stand, I shuffled pieces around, I attempted to switch to other corners, I prayed to the S&L, SAIF, and even the FDIC … all to no avail.

I was in full crisis mode!  And I was not about to admit defeat within the text accompanying the photos of this simple looking puzzle.  So I spent even more time on it but now have to call a cease fire and make a deal to blog about this one again once I solve it in order to get this blog out before the next NYD release.

This puzzle packs a tremendous ROI.  You should definitely put your money here!

J11GSAW – Haym Hirsh

Haym Hirsh has been on a tear with developing ever increasingly difficult Jigsaw Puzzles.  Eschewing the tedium of 1000+ piece jigsaw puzzles, Haym has taken to reducing these to less than a dozen pieces.  In fact, the first one I worked on consisted of only 4 pieces (All Corners, No Corners – 4-Piece Jigsaw).

This NYD release has Haym’s latest Jigsaw creation.  It’s called J11GSAW but it comes with 22 pieces.  What’s up with that?  What’s up is that it has 2 challenges supported by their own set of 11 pieces.  As with the prior Jigsaw puzzles, the pieces are squares with innies and outies added to give them a puzzly look.  Yes, believe it or not, innies and outies are technical jigsaw speak.  One set has these features located on the center of the edges and the other has them near the corners.  The puzzle is made with laser-cut acrylic with a white tray with blue highlights and one set of 11 red pieces and another set of 11 blue pieces.    

I should warn you that Haym has a black belt in packing packing geometric shapes and is the record holder for packing 19 equilateral triangles in the smallest possible circle.

After being beaten up on S&L Crisis, I approached J11GSAW with a bit of trepidation.  Unlike S&L, this one did not appear to be easy so I was hoping to be completely wrong again!  And I was.  While both the red and blue sets were solid challenges, I managed to solve them within a reasonable amount of time.

Is this just a square packing exercise?  Not at all!  Haym has taken it to the next level and jigsawed the design to nicely integrate these 2 aspects into a nice set of challenges.  They are both very well done!

Au Pays – Gilles Kutten

Recently, a new puzzle designer has popped up on the Mechanical Puzzle Discord with new 2D tray packing and symmetry puzzles.  His symmetry puzzles have quickly gone from first attempts to producing excellent designs in a matter of days.  The first of these refined designs by Gilles Kutten is Au Pays consisting of 4 dark blue laser-cut pieces based on a triangular grid.  As with most good symmetry puzzles, the pieces have similar characteristics allowing them to be put together in multiple ways without an obvious hint as to which ones may be correct.  You have to work for it.  It’s not overly difficult but a nice challenge and well done.  Worth getting if you like 2D Symmetry Puzzles.

Monster Eats Ducks – Gilles Kutten

The second 2D symmetry puzzle from Gilles Kutten in this release is a monster.  This one is really tough.

Monster Eats Ducks is made from orange laser-cut acrylic and consists of 4 pieces.  The pieces don’t look like they are very complex.  You can almost imagine that they were randomly created like duck sauce stains on a table cloth.  Playing around with the pieces demonstrates that they can interact with each other in any number of ways.  And therein lies the problem.   With so many ways that they can interact with each other, it is difficult to zoom in on the correct relationships.

After establishing how easy it was to connect pieces, I quickly determined that it was not as easy to get something that remotely looked like it would even pretend to be symmetric.  And as difficult as it was to initially find anything close to symmetric, after an extended period of time, I eventually found a couple of configurations that were indeed very close.  In fact at one point, I thought that I had solved it only to realize moments after announcing my triumph that it was just slightly off from being symmetric.  Slightly embarrassed, I had to do a take-back AHA (that’s AHA spelled backwards and pronounce with a descending tone instead of a rising one).

During my initial search for symmetry, there was a significant hint that I dutifully ignored for a long time.  However, I eventually caught on and began symmetricizing pieces in earnest.  And it still wasn’t easy.  I kept circling back around to the comfort of the close configurations.  After a protracted battle, the monster finally reared its ugly head, or maybe I should say its symmetrically appealing head, to celebrate the win.

This is an amazingly good puzzle from a new designer.  I highly recommend this one if you are interested in 2D symmetry puzzles.

Sharpened – Gilles Kutten

Not only is Gilles Kutten honing his skills but he is also sharpening the pieces.  The pieces of his third symmetry puzzle in this release have been sharpened and are rather pointy.

Sharpened is a 2D symmetry puzzle made from red laser-cut acrylic and consists of 5 pieces.  Although it has more pieces than Monster Eats Ducks, solving this puzzle is not nearly as difficult.  The final shape is far from obvious.  It always amazes me how the pieces of 2D symmetry puzzles can hide the final shape so well.  This one’s more fun than difficult.

Windy – Alexander Magyarics

NYD has produced several 2D symmetry puzzles designed by Alexander Magyarics and Windy is the latest entry in this collection.  Windy is made from dark blue laser-cut acrylic and consists of 3 pieces that together make a symmetric shape.  

Windy provides a perfect balance of being challenging while not appearing very complex.  I expected no less from an experienced symmetrologist like Alexander.  With only 3 pieces, you would think that you could try every possible combination of the pieces to quickly identify the solution, but this is not the case.

I find that my best strategy for solving symmetry puzzles is to use hindsight.  I came to this conclusion a long time ago when I realized that the solutions were obvious after I had solved them.  It’s a bit like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Puzzle where you know now that you don’t know the positions of the pieces and that you don’t know when you will know the positions of the pieces.

Being temporally challenged, I had to manually wade through all the events between initiating and completing the solution constantly moving against the wind.  And this puzzle is Windy!  After completing my go-to random try this and that method to filter out the easy challenges, I moved on to the more serious approach otherwise known as the slightly less random try this and that method.

Without spoiling anything, the pieces sport clues to be exploited although resolving the issues that they present seems to be difficult to accomplish.  I found myself going around in circles on this one before I finally constructed a symmetric shape.  It’s very tricky and I recommend adding it to your 2D symmetry puzzle collection.

You may also want to check out Alexander’s other 2D symmetry puzzles from NYD including Amoeba, Baikonur, DNA, Thin LiZZy, F Fort, Hangers, Three Keys, RMF, Half Correction, A Lady’s Mess, Tasmania, Talons, and Delta Force.

Answers From The Void – Sixmetry

There is something appealing about a packing puzzle with identical pieces.  I think it has to do with the initial assessment done by the subconscious mind where it realizes that it has less shapes to deal with and throws a couple of dopamine chits your way.  And yes, fewer shapes does equate to less complexity, which in many cases results in easier.

Sixmetry is a 3D packing puzzle designed by David Goodman and made by Vinco.  It was used by Patrick Major at the 41st International Puzzle Party as his exchange puzzle.  The puzzle consists of 6 identical wood pieces that need to be packed in a 4x4x4 wooden box.  Each piece consists of a 2x2x1 board attached to a 2x3x1 board.   The pieces consisting of 10 voxels each only use 60 voxels of the 64 voxel box leaving 4 of them unoccupied.

Even without the clue in the name, I would have guessed that the solution would be a symmetric shape.  In fact with 4 empty voxels in a 4x4x4 box, I assumed we had a Slothouber–Graatsma situation brewing here.  Don’t google that if you want to avoid spoilers.

There are a lot of puzzles that fall into this category.  A lot.  So many!  And after so many, when you are presented with one of these, you basically know where the empty voxels are located, which simplifies determining the solution.  And this allowed me to solve Sixmetry in about 5 minutes.  I’m sure it would have taken a lot longer if I hadn’t know the positions of the empty voxels.

And extra points for Vinco for providing the non-solution packing configuration on the instruction sheet.

A Physical Manifestation Of An Ethereal Concept – T Pack

Haym Hirsh, a professor of computer science for 100100 years, presents us with the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework.  This educational model describes the intersections between technology, pedagogy, and content for the effective integration of technology within teaching.  It consists of 3 contextual knowledge categories: content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and technological knowledge, the 3 pairwise intersections of these categories, and the overall 3-way intersection representing the entire framework.  Realizing that such a conceptual frameworks would not capture much interest, Haym transformed this abstract concept into something more physical albeit somewhat still cerebral.  The framework has become a box frame, and the 3 knowledge categories and 3 pairwise intersections have each been embodied in a T.  He has anointed this physical construction with the name T Pack.  Note the introduction of the critical space to distance it from the original ethereal concept.

T Pack is a 3D apparent cube packing puzzle designed by Haym Hirsh and made by Wood Wonders.  It consists of 6 wood T-shaped pieces that need to be packed within a 3D printed box made with wood infused filament.  And the box has been specifically constructed so that each side presents a smooth 3D printed plate-side finish.

Each side of the box has a square opening in each corner except for 1 side that has a corner shifted to the middle of a side to merge with the adjacent corner.  The edge of the new opening has also been removed to provide a full 2x1 voxel opening for inserting and removing the Ts.  And even though you can’t pass the Ts through the square windows, they are large enough for the pieces to poke out of them.

The goal is to pack 6 Ts in a box.  What a great concept!  I’m quite partial to 6 T puzzles (Shhhh! She Just Turned – 6T and Not A Box For Tea, A – T-Box).

Since all the pieces are the same T shape,  you only need to investigate how that one piece can enter the box and how it can manipulated once inside.  After looking for possible 3x3x3 assemblies outside the box, it quickly becomes apparent that some of the pieces will need to be rotated.  And although there’s not a lot of room within the box, all those windows facilitate the rotation of pieces.

Since not all the voxels within the box will be occupied by the Ts, the first piece removed from the solved configuration does not necessarily need to come out in the first move.  In fact with all those windows, there could possibly be a lot of movement before the first piece comes out.  I focused on the removal of this first piece as a starting point of how the pieces would be configured.  Of course, I didn’t start with the correct way to remove this piece and spent quite a bit of time unnecessarily cajoling pieces into positions to no avail.

It’s always fun when you get half the pieces in, decide it’s not going to work, and then have to figure out how to get them back out for another think.  Sometimes its because I naively thought I could do something undoable or sometimes its because I simply lose my way.  I’ve recently noticed a strong correlation between puzzle experience and losing the thread of a solution.

After discovering an infinite number of ways that the Ts can’t be rotated within a partially filled box, I finally manged to get everything aligned and had an apparent cube of Ts within the box.  The solution entails a nice sequence of moves with rotations and I really enjoyed this one.  At the time of this posting, T Pack was still available at Wood Wonders.

Infesting In Puzzles – Parasitic Version

I have a lot of burr puzzles and they seem to be accumulating at an alarming rate.  This seems to be my retirement strategy.  Collect as many wood burrs as possible for the day I can’t afford the heating bill.  Or maybe they’re just fuel for the soul.  

I particularly love 6 piece burrs.  And 6 piece burrs with 9 pieces are even better!  This seems to be the result of an ever increasing tendency to stuff things in burrs.

Parasitic Version is a 6 + 3 piece burr designed by László Molnár.  It was made by Pelikan Puzzles and used by Gergely Prémecz as his exchange puzzle for the 41st International Puzzle Party (IPP).  The 6 main burr pieces consist of 2 pairs each of Wenge, Acacia, and Purpleheart. and the parasites are made from Maple and Bubinga.

You know from the start that getting parasites into the burr will not be easy since Wenge, Acacia, and Purpleheart are naturally pest resistant hardwoods.

I believe that the puzzle came with the 6 piece burr assembled with the parasitic pieces outside.  However, it was such a long time ago from when I originally received it and made a pile of pieces that I really can’t remember how it arrived.  I really don’t know why I keep acquiring new puzzles when I could just redo the same ones over and over again for the first time.  Yes, I do – and you do too!

I started the solving process by assuming that the 6 large burr pieces were actually paired by wood type.  Wouldn’t you?  It doesn’t necessarily have to be that way, but typically if there are 3 types of wood used, the pieces are paired,  This gives you a boost in the solving process since you don’t have to worry about all those other combinations.  Of course it’s also sometimes used to force a single or more difficult configuration.  So using the logic of purposeful intent, I went with the paired approach and started to look at possible configurations.

For each possible configuration of 6 burr pieces, the next step is to determine whether the parasites can be packed within the central envelope.  After a couple rounds of that, the process changed to one of looking to generate specific configurations that will accommodate the parasites instead of testing randomly generated candidates.

And then the fun really starts when you have to insert the parasites.  Of course, you can’t just let them dig their way in.  That would be boring!  You must go through all the proper channels and find the correct way to get them all nestled in their new home.  After spending some time with these buggers, you begin to get a feel for what will pack and what won’t that you can then narrow down to the winning configuration.  Even then, you have to still get it together, which I found an interesting juggling act with 9 pieces and 2 hands.

When everything is said and done, you are rewarded with a 6 piece burr that looks exactly like it did when you started.  But you know the difference because now, you’re infested in the process.

A Small Puzzle Can Still Be – Epic

EPIC is a 3D apparent-cube packing puzzle designed by Václav Obšivač from VIN&CO.  It is rated at a level of 5+, which is VIN&CO’s highest level of difficulty.  It consists of a box and 6 pieces that have to be packed in the box.  The 6 pieces are all identical - well almost identical.  Each piece consists of a square plank with a cube attached to a corner and one of the pieces has a misaligned cube.  I don’t know how this got past quality control.  Speaking of quality control, the box is far from being cubic and slants quite a bit in all directions.  In other words, it’s an oblate trigonal trapezohedron.

I’ve always been intrigued by the look of Epic and jumped when I had a chance to acquire one recently.  The skewed shape is what makes this puzzle interesting.  Although it shouldn’t, the shape has a tendency to throw your perspective off.  It’s a nice touch to a clever puzzle.

Since the puzzle arrived assembled, I quickly took it apart without paying attention to the details. As usual, I’m so successful at this that I need to start with determining what the solved configuration looks like.  And in this case, it’s not too difficult to determine what shape the apparent cube needs to be.

Each side of the box has a rectangular opening that allows pieces to added.  All that needs to be done is to determine how to construct an apparent cube and then feed the pieces through the openings into the box.  Once I got past the skewed perspective, I was able to quickly construct the apparent cube within the box albeit with my head cocked at an odd angle.  For a 5+ level puzzle, I found this one a pretty quick solve aside from the torticollis effect.  However, it’s well done and I’m glad I picked it up.

Finding Elegance – Four Pieces

Four Pieces was designed by Emrehan Halici and entered in the Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition at the 41st International Puzzle Party (IPP).  He also used it as his exchange puzzle for IPP41.  It is made from laser-cut acrylic with a double-sided black tray with white lettering and 4 red pieces that need to be packed in the tray.  It also comes in a very nice box specifically made for the puzzle.

The pieces remind me of the great white shark Bruce from Finding Nemo.  He was the character that lead a support group for sharks that want to be friends with other less toothy fish.  And indeed, your mission here is to get these fishy pieces to cooperate within a room.

Each side of the tray has a different shaped conference room for the Fish Are Friends, Not Food meetings.  One side of the tray has a square conference room to be filled and the other has a hexagonal conference room.

I only spent a few minutes trying to herd great white sharks around before really getting down to examining the pieces.   The sharks had the look of being the product of intelligent design leading me to assume that there would be an elegant solution.  With that in mind, I tackled the puzzle in earnest.

I started with the square conference room since it had a higher order of symmetry, which I figured would have an easier discoverable elegant solution.  And I was not wrong.  It didn’t take long to commence the meeting in the square conference room.

The hexagonal conference room takes a bit more effort,  I found a couple of configurations that were just shy of fitting.  I was tempted to blame the contractors but I’m all too familiar with the close but wrong scenario where more effort (mental, not physical) is required.  And yes, my faux solutions were elegant as well.  I eventually realized what I was missing and found the true elegant solution to bring the final meeting to order.

And finally, please note that you are packing great white sharks in conference rooms.  There are no red herrings in these meetings.

Nothing Yet Designs Release: 7 February 2025, 12:00 PM EST

The next puzzle release from Nothing Yet Designs (NYD) will take place this coming Friday, 7 February 2025 at 12:00 PM EST.  Don’t forget to put it on your calendar and set your alarm.

In preparation for the release, I practiced some magic.  The type of magic that occurs when a box full of puzzles arrives at your doorstep.  This particular box was full of puzzles nicely wrapped in NYD’s signature packaging for the upcoming release.  The release consists of a variety of puzzle types that I’ve had the pleasure to play with for several days.  And now it’s time to share these puzzles with you.

Haeckel Sphere – Lee Krasnow

In 1971, Stewart Coffin designed a geometric puzzle named Jupiter, which was patented in 1974.  It is constructed of 60 sticks that are glued in sets of 5 to make 12 puzzle pieces.  Constructing the puzzle with the 12 pieces is not difficult, but the original puzzles were made using 6 different types of wood with the ultimate goal to assemble the puzzle with color symmetry.  Later, Stewart also made a version that used 10 different types of wood.

Decades later, Lee Krasnow decided to take advantage of 3D printing to make the pieces fancier as well as provide addition color schemes.  Inspired by the 1904 lithograph Blastoidea by Ernst Haeckel, Lee made the pieces more organic, specifically oceanic, and the Haeckel Sphere was born.  And in addition to the original 2 color schemes developed by Stewart, Lee added another 6.  

One of the really interesting things about the geometry of this Haeckel Sphere is that the underlying triacontahedral structure has its own icosahedral and dodecahedral symmetry, as well as several ways to get cubic and tetrahedral symmetry. – Lee Krasnow

Although creatures from the Blastoidea class are now extinct, you can still enjoy a deep dive into the challenges that they have inspired.  NYD is now providing 2 versions of the Haeckel Sphere – a 2-color easier version and a 5-color harder version.  Physically, the difficulty to assemble each puzzle is the same.  The difficulty is in achieving symmetry with the colors of the pieces.  And each of the puzzles has 5 solutions with color symmetry.  According to Lee Krasnow, you haven’t completely solved the puzzle until you’ve found all 5 solutions.  Good luck finding all 5 solutions with color symmetry!

The 5-Color Tetrahedral Haeckel Sphere from NYD looks amazing!  And that’s with a non-symmetrical random assembly.  It is 3D printed with 5 different eye catching colors – red, blue, purple, yellow, and orange with black tips.  All 12 pieces of the 5-color version are different and consist of 6 mirror image pairs.   

A little math before moving on.  There are 12 pieces with 5 arms (normally they’re called sticks but we’re taking the organic perspective here) providing 60 arms total.  When the pieces are joined, 3 arms come together to form a side, which results in 20 sides.  Thus you end up with something resembling an icosahedron – 12 vertices, 20 faces.

A solution where all 3 arms of each side are the same color (4 sides of each color) was certainly my first goal.  For my first attempt at assembling it with uniformly colored sides, I ended up with a couple of sides with mismatched colors.  For my second attempt, I took a bit more care and laid all the pieces out on the table in an unfolded state to get the colors where they needed to be before assembling them.  Once assembled, I finally had my first solution.

But where is the symmetry?  It took me a while to realize that the symmetry was for each individual color and not for the entire puzzle as an ensemble, resulting in 5 colors with tetrahedral symmetry.  One solution down, 4 to go.  However, I already know that not all of the symmetry solutions have uniformly colored sides and I expect the non-uniform ones to be a bit trickier.

Single Color + White Tips

The 2-Color Checkered Haeckel Sphere is 3D printed with light and dark green pieces and white tips.  Unlike the 5-Color Tetrahedral version, all 12 pieces are identical with 3 arms of one color and 2 of the other making this a significantly easier challenge.  A solution where all the arms of each side are the same color would have 12 sides of one color and 8 of the other.  And of course, there are 5 color symmetry solutions to construct.

In addition to these 2 Haeckel Sphere Options, NYD will also provide a single color version on request if you are simply interested in constructing the shape.  Just send them an email.  My wife wanted a color varying blue version with white tips, which turned out awesome.  And now I get to keep 2 Haeckel Spheres on display in my living room.  We call them Haeckel and Jaeckel.

Sliding Heart – Naoyuki Iwase (Osho)

It’s that time of year when our thoughts turn to all things heart related, specifically heart puzzles.  At least it will after THE GAME.

Sliding Heart is a multi-challenge 2D sliding puzzle designed by Naoyuki Iwase (Osho) and made from laser-cut acrylic with a white frame and black matte pieces.  The square piece is adorned with a red heart to complement the red text on the frame.  The goal is to put your heart in the right place, i.e.,  move it from the starting position of each challenge to the upper-right corner by sliding the pieces in the frame.  And even though there is sufficient room to rotate pieces within the frame, it is not allowed.

There are 10 challenges starting from a respectable 20 move challenge all the way up to an 85 move challenge.  And I’m sure many of you will avail yourselves to many more moves than necessary like I did.  I started with the 20 move challenge and knocked it out of the park.  I then jumped to the 38 move challenge and it knocked me out of the park.  1, 2, 3, 4, ...37, 38, 39, ...88, 89, … 163, 164, … 298, 299, … 568, 569, ...

I kept going around and around and around in circles, doing the same thing over and over and over again.  And then some more.  I even restarted a couple of times to no avail.  
Now I have a confession to make.  Doubting that such a simple looking puzzle could flumux my superior solving capabilities, I entered it into BurrTools to verify that there was a solution.  No it’s not cheating.  It’s verifying, ver-i-fy-ing!  Cross my heart.  Anyway, BurrTools sided with Sliding Heart indicating that I needed to up my 2D sliding game.  So if you find yourself in doubt, take heart, there is a solution.

After an eternity of being stuck on 38, I decided to be a little less cocky and try the 26 move challenge.  I worked diligently on this one until several hundred moves later I finally arrived at … the starting point of the 38 move challenge.  Aghhhhhh!  Basically, I spent a lot of time going from 26 moves from the end to 38 moves from the end! Crestfallen, I was fervently hoping that good ol’ number 38 would not be the black hole of challenges that would swallow all the others and myself along with them.  I finally manged to assure myself that this would not be the case since most challenges have different piece orientations.  Desperate for a confidence boost, I tackled the 33 move challenge and manged to solve it for a win.  Right now, I’m 2/4 for the 4 shortest challenges.

Sliding Heart may not look that difficult but it packs a punch.  I love it!  Very challenging and not for the faint of heart.  And I’m looking forward to solving all the challenges although there is slim chance of me solving them in the minimum number of moves.

Flying Heart – Naoyuki Iwase (Osho)

Never having officially played with a flying puzzle has never stopped me from making pieces fly.  You know what I’m talk’n about.  I’ve seen references to flying puzzles before, but this was my first opportunity to try one.

Flying Heart is a multi-challenge 2D flying puzzle designed by Naoyuki Iwase (Osho) and made from laser-cut acrylic.  Like Sliding Heart, it uses the same black, white, and red motif.  However, it is not a sliding puzzle but a flying puzzle.  For a flying puzzle, each move consists of picking a piece up from the 2D frame and placing it back down in another spot.  It may be placed down in a different orientation, but it cannot be turned over.

The goal is to mend a broken heart.  Unlike Sliding Heart, the heart of Flying Heart is divided across 3 pieces.  To solve each challenge requires reconstructing the heart on the bottom right of the tray.  And there are 25 challenges ranging from 8 moves to solve up to 21 moves to solve.  That may not sound like a lot of moves compared to a sliding puzzle, but it takes some mental adjustment to see several moves ahead with flying pieces.

Like Sliding Heart, I decided to start with the challenge requiring the least number of moves - 8.  Several hundred moves later, I decided it might be best to reset and start over.  Keeping in mind that the solution only requires 8 moves, I preceded more carefully.  Ta-Da!  I finally solved it although I’m sure that it wasn’t a pure 8 move solution.

Unlike Sliding Heart, Flying Heart is more suitable to seeking the optimal path.  The challenges require less moves and after having done several challenges, you will become familiar various configurations that you will use as waypoints.  However, these waypoints may not lie on the optimal path.  And seeking the optimal path will keep you from trodding the familiar path, which will keep the challenges fresh and exciting and set your heart aflutter.
 

Family – Lucie Pauwels

So what do you call a 2D packing puzzle where the pieces just don’t seem to get along or work well with each other?  Well, you call it Family of course!

I always enjoy seeing what puzzles Lucie Pauwels is creating.  She regularly posts updates on Facebook and at the end of last year she posted about a puzzle called Family.  This is one that you could quickly glance at and easily discount, but you would be making a mistake.  I’m guilty myself of passing this one over when I first saw it.  But NYD saw the value and decided to make it available to the puzzle community causing me to take a second look.  And with that second look, I saw the brilliance of the puzzle and the anticipated Aha moment to arrive.

Family is a 2D packing puzzle designed by Lucie Pauwels and is made from Laser-cut acrylic.  It consists of a tray with orange and red pieces.  There are 8 uniquely sized orange pieces that are each missing a single square and 4 identical red pieces consisting of 2 squares.  The tray highlights are orange to match the pieces.  The goal is to place all 12 pieces within the 2D tray with the pieces completely filling the tray.

I tackled this puzzle assuming that I knew what the Aha was and that I just didn’t know deep it would go.  After some time, I thought that maybe the Aha was that there wasn’t an Aha and I was outwitting myself.  And then, Aha, I got it and all the pieces were packed within the tray.  Was it the Aha I was expecting?  Was it as deep as I was expecting?  Was it the meta Aha?  I won’t spoil it for you but I’m glad that NYD picked this one up.  I would have completely missed it otherwise.

Animals Party – Frederic Boucher

The objective of Animals Party is to pack all the party animals in the provided areas so that they are all getting along.  However, they don’t really get along very well.  It’s like planning a large family gathering where Uncle Jake refuses to sit next to Aunt Sue, cousin Mabel can’t stand being around Grandpa Ben or Grandma Lucy, etc.  You may be tempted to look upon this situation as a logistics nightmare, but in reality, it’s a puzzle.  And if it wasn’t challenging, we would be disappointed.  

Animals Party is a 2D packing puzzle designed by Frederic Boucher made with laser cut acrylic.  It consists of 8 bestial hexanimals in a primal yellow that need to be packed on a verdant green field within a dark night black surrounding.  You can tell just by looking at this menagerie that they really don’t want to be next to each other.  And yet, you need to crowd them all together.  And you have to do it twice, since each side of the tray has a different challenge.

The front side consists of a field 8 cube-its wide by 7 cube-its high.  3 cube-its are already filled in opposite corners for you leaving 50 empty cube-its for entertaining party animals.  However, the 8 hexanimals only require 48 cube-its, although they would certainly disagree.  This leaves 2 unoccupied cube-its.

Let’s talk about those 2 spaces for a minute.  These extra spaces increase the puzzle difficulty.  Without these extra spaces, you would simply recognize situations where pieces will not fit.  With the spaces, they don’t have to fit exactly and this adds an additional level of uncertainty.  And the level of difficulty increases exponentially with each additional space until it hits a max and starts to decrease.  At some point, there are enough spaces to provide room where pieces can be packed in non-rectilinear orientations.  Thankfully, this transition point is greater than 2 for this puzzle.  And no, making 2 little square pieces doesn’t make this problem go away.

The problem is not that it’s hard to generate spaces when packing the pieces, it’s that it’s hard to only generate 2.  My advice is to try to think of the spaces as gimme’s, like the 2 that you probably take in a round of golf.  As you place the pieces in the tray and end up with a trapped hole that can’t be filled, you just took one of your gimme’s.  Once you’ve used up both, every remaining piece now has to fill the remaining space exactly.

I started on the front side and quickly discovered just how unfriendly the hexanimals were towards each other.  All alpha pieces for sure.  And there was one in particular that had it out for me.  After spectacularly failing to find a solution after a good amount of time on the front side tray, I decided to try the other side.  

The back-side is a whole other kettle of fish.  It immediately has 2 things going for it that make it appear easier than the front.  The first is that there are 48 cube-its leaving no empty spaces when all the hexanimals are present.  The other is that the field has 9 islands that help separate the hexanimals, giving them some breathing room.  And for me, it indeed turned out to be easier.  I found an approach that revealed the solution in quick fashion.  As it turned out, my nemesis on the front side became my buddy on the back.  Truthfully, I needed this win before going back to the front-side challenge.

Heading back to the front side after my win on the back, I was in a better frame of mind and finally managed to knock out the solution.  Perhaps coming to terms with my prior nemesis aided my approach.  This puzzle from Frederic was a solid challenge and I would certainly recommend taking the same approach of starting on the front side and using the back as a break.

Minima Bauhaus – Frederic Boucher

NYD announced on the Mechanical Puzzle Discord (MPD) that they are working on providing a puzzle from the Minima series every month for 2025.  For this release, it’s Minima Bauhaus.

The Bauhaus was a German art school designed by Walter Gropius and operated between 1919 and 1933.  The school design approach was a marriage of form and function with an emphasis on simple geometric shapes like rectangles.

Minima Bauhaus, the puzzle, was designed by Frederic Boucher and is a marriage of form and function with an emphasis on simple geometric shapes like rectangles.  It is 3D printed with a black box and white and blue and white-and-blue pieces.

The first thing that I noticed about Minima Bauhaus was that it already came with all the pieces inside the box.  Is this a disassembly puzzle?  Maybe.  So I took the pieces out and examined them.  There are 6 gray dominoes and 9 blue tile pieces.  3 of the gray dominoes have a blue tile permanently attached to them.  The gray pieces certainly conform to the 2x2x3 minima format but what about all those tiles.  And the box is wide open on 5 sides with only a lip around the edges to hold the pieces in.

Packed But Not Solved

It was then that I heard that little voice in my head sounding like my wife saying maybe you should read the directions.  So I went looking for the box it came in and sure enough, it’s not a straight packing puzzle, but one that needs to meet 2 additional criteria.  1 – The dominoes can not touch each other, and 2 – Have the same number of dominoes appear in each opening.  So, we need a Bauhaus with 6 rectangular rooms separated by walls.

I put on my best bauhausian face and set about constructing a Bauhaus.  My first Bauhaus had 4 rooms visible through one of the windows.  With a little adjustment, I ended up with a winning combination that I successfully constructed in the box.  

I found this one to be on the easier side of the minima series but it could just be due to my bauhausian nature.  It’s fun challenge regardless.  And as a second challenge, try to restore it back to the unsolved state it came in when you’re done.

Square In – Frederic Boucher

Being square is in.   Or is it being in squares is in.  Or perhaps squares in square is in.  Maybe it’s making squares in Square In is in.  Yeah, let’s go with that one.

Square In is a multiple challenge puzzle designed by Frederic Boucher.  It consists of a 2 sided tray made from white acrylic and 8 blue laser-cut acrylic pieces.  The concept is totally square man.  Frederic dissected a square into 3 other squares consisting of an inner core, an intermediate square ring and an outer square ring.  He then dissected the 2 rings into smaller pieces to finally end up with the core square, 2 L triominoes, 4 L pentominoes, and 1 C hexomino.  The objective is to recreate these 3 squares in the front side of the tray.

But wait, there’s more!  The tray has an opening on the bottom and it’s a 2D restricted opening packing puzzle.  Realizing that you would be there forever trying to figure out how to slid the pieces in to make the 3 squares, Frederic decided to help you out by strategically placing dots on the pieces.  Note that the pieces are 2-sided and the dots are not the same on each side.  The first challenge is slide the pieces in through the opening such that when they are in place, the dots form the inner core square and the outer square ring.  You may have to rotated pieces once they are inserted in the frame.  The second challenge is to insert the pieces so that only the intermediate square ring is shown.

I enjoyed both challenges and I didn’t find either of them very difficult.  There is enough feedback between the dot patterns and restricted opening constraints to guide where the pieces need to be.  Personally, I like the open top since it’s easier to move the pieces than through finger holes in a top, but then again, I’m not tempted to cheat.  Just like I know that you would never be tempted to lift an edge as you move pieces around.

But wait there’s more!  On the backside is another tray with 36 color tiles, 4 tiles each of 9 different colors.  This additional challenge is to add all the pieces except the square piece to the tray so that 4 tiles of the same color remain visible.  And you have 9 colors, so that makes 8 additional challenges.  Wait a minute … 60 seconds later … What happened to the 9th color?  Well to make the process harder, one of the colors was designed to not have a solution.  However, you are not told which color that is.  Thus, until you have completed all 8 of the solutions, you can never be certain whether a color has a solution or not.  Do you give up on a color and move to the next one or do you keep trying to find a solution?

These challenges aren’t very difficult, but I did spend more time on the unsolvable color than any of the others.  I think that design decision worked well and was more interesting than if all 9 colors had a solution since I found them to be rather quick solves.

But wait there’s more!  Not satisfied with the double sided tray, Frederic decided to add another set of challenges.  He divided the 8 pieces into 2 sets of 4 and designed 15 shapes that can be made with the sets.  Each set can make 8 shapes.  Wait a minute … another 60 seconds later … That’s 16 shapes total!  Well it turns out that one of the shapes can be made by both sets.  But does Frederic let you know which one that is.  Of course not.  As you solve each one with one of the sets, you’re never sure if you can move on to the next one or whether you should try to solve it with the other set.

I found these to be quick solves and I have some advice for you on how to go about it.  Before looking at the target shapes, take the 2 sets and try to make the same shape with each.  This is basically a cover-up puzzle.  If you’re like me, you’re shape will look nothing like any of the target shapes.  Personally, I found this more challenging than trying to make a specific shape.  Once you’ve done that, find a set that works with each of the shapes.  When you are done, you will have 8 shapes with 1 set and 7 with the other.  You can then go back to each of the shapes associated with the first set and see if it can be made with the second set.  I found this the most interesting part of the this challenge.  If you’re like me, after the first couple of target shapes, you will be able to look at them and almost see exactly how the pieces would fit in.

Marble Cake + – Frederic Boucher

It’s 2018 and I buy a puzzle called Marble Cake Plus from Cubicdissection (CD).  It consists of 7 pieces that have to be packed into a restricted opening box.  The interior of the box has a 4x4x2 space for supporting 32 voxels and there is also a hole in the side providing another voxel making the total 33 voxels.  The pieces only require 28 voxels since each is comprised of 4.  I complete the puzzle and solve it stored with that hole in the side nicely filled.

Now it’s 2025 and NYD is releasing Marble Cake +.  However, the walls of the box are not as thick as a voxel and it would look rather strange to have one of the pieces sticking out of the side in the solved state.  It is now obvious that the hole in the side is indeed not a final resting place but a temporary one and I now had an additional challenge.

Really?  Not Solved?
(CD Version)

In 2015, Frederic Boucher designed a puzzle called Marble Cake.  The goal was to pack 7, 4-voxel pieces in a 4x4x2 space.  Three of the pieces have offset voxels adding to the challenge of tightly packing the pieces.  Not long after, the design was plussed up to make it a restricted opening 3D packing challenge with an additional hole placed in the side of the box.

The NYD release of Marble Cake + is made with exotic wood pieces and a clear frosted acrylic box.  The goal is to place all 7 pieces in the box through the 2x2 opening in the top so that the pieces are completely contained within the box.  And please feel free to solve the second challenge of all the pieces within the box with one poking out of the hole on the side.

With the discovery that I had not failed to solve the puzzle but solved an alternate challenge, I took the challenge to find the main solution.  It doesn’t take long to realize that the pieces with offset voxels don’t play well with the others or even themselves.  I was a bit nonplussed to discover how difficult it was to fit the pieces within the required space even without the restricted opening.

Both the challenges, the official one and my alternate one, are not trivial.  I won’t tell you how I eventually solved them, but I will say I went through the typical 3D restricted opening toolkit including the Endgame approach, the What’s this hole here doing for me? approach, the How can I even get these pieces in this shape approach, and most importantly the Never give up, Never surrender! approach.

Marble Cake + is a nice challenge and if 3D packing puzzles are your thing, you don’t want to pass this one up.

Blast-Hedron 12 – Nan Ma

First there was Blast-Hedron 4 (BH4), then Blast-Hedron 6 (BH6) and now Blast-Hedron 12 (BH12).  The latest member of the Blast-Hedron family continues the evolution of Coordinate-Motion (CM) dexterity challenges designed by Nan Ma.  If you are familiar with BH4 and BH6, you’re already familiar with the challenge of assembling BH4 and how much more challenging BH6 is with 2 extra pieces.  So how difficult would the 12 piece BH12 be?

The 12 pieces of BH12 are identical in shape and come in 6 colors with 2 pieces of each color: yellow, orange, red, purple, blue, and green.  After working on Haeckel Sphere, you may recognize the shape of BH12 as being a truncated icosahedron – an icosahedron with all the tips cut off.  However, unlike Haeckel Sphere, the challenge with BH12 is the physical assembly.  As a CM puzzle, you know that you will have to suspend all 12 pieces at an exact location and orientation in space and them move all them at the same time along a different vector.  With only 2 hands, you may need some additional help juggling all those pieces.

However, I can confirm that it is possible to assemble solo, even without suspending the pieces from the ceiling.  I did notice something unexpected as I added the pieces to the final shape.  It starts out easy as you match a single side, then 2, and then a little more difficult as you have to match 3 sides.  And then something interesting and unintuitive happens.  As you get to the last 2 pieces, it starts to get easier again.  The last piece that I was expecting to be the hardest to add, turned out to one of the easiest.

I’m really enjoying these Blast-Hedrons and they look amazing.  I wonder if Nan Ma has any other designs like this up his sleeve.  I’m not quite sure where you would go after a truncated icosahedron.

Ball Buster – Lee Krasnow

Sometimes a puzzle is a real ball buster.  And then sometimes, a Ball Buster is a real puzzle.

This classy looking 3D printed meta puzzle was designed by Lee Krasnow.  It is based on Stewart Coffin’s Cluster Buster puzzle after having undergone spherelizification.  The puzzle comes assembled and solving the puzzle is performed in 2 acts.  In the first act, you are the ball buster.  In the second act, you swap roles and the puzzle becomes the ball buster.

I tried 2 ways to disassemble Ball Buster but I could only get one to work.  I believe that the design effectively shuts the other way down.  And no, using external tools including fingernails is not allowed.

During the intermission, you have the 6 pieces that together aspire to unite into a single perfect sphere.  Or spherical shell as it’s hollow.  The pieces are 3D printed using a metallic gray look with white and black highlights.  The highlights are actually screwed on the main pieces in krasnowian fashion.  The 6 pieces consist of 2 sets of 3 pieces each, one left-handed and the other right-handed.  The objective is to determine how to juggle 6 pieces with round ends using 2 hands and reassemble them into a spherical shape.  Having a lot of experience working on ball buster projects, I was able to assemble Ball Buster pretty quickly.  However, if you lead a more stress-free life, you may find this more challenging.

If you find that you can’t solve it, it does comes with a 3 piece consolation puzzle that you can put together that doubles as a stand for Ball Buster when and if you reassemble it.  The Ball Buster Base is a mini coordinate motion puzzle that comes in the same 3 colors as Ball Buster.  For a 3 piece CM puzzle, it’s a nice little challenge.  And together, they display quite nicely in the living room.