All Corners, No Corners – 4 Piece Jigsaw

4 Piece Jigsaw was designed by Haym Hirsh and used as his International Puzzle Party (IPP) exchange puzzle for IPP41.  As indicated by the name, there are 4 jigsaw puzzle pieces that have to be placed in a square area.  Of course none of the pieces have a straight edge, making them all edge pieces without an edge or since there are only 4, all corner pieces without corners.

The puzzle was made by Nothing Yet Designs using laser-cut acrylic.  Going with the US based IPP red, white, and blue theme (as opposed to, for example, a bleu, blanc, rouge theme for France), the puzzle was made with a white frame and red and blue pieces.  The frame consists of 2 layers of acrylic that are bolted together with the bolt caps acting as tray legs.  Mine needed some tightening, so make sure you don’t unexpectedly loose yours.

Typical jigsaw solving starts with separating edge pieces from middle pieces and then pulling out the 4 corner pieces from the edge pieces.  With only 4 pieces, you would expect all the pieces to look like corners, but you realize that this will be a puzzle without a clean exterior edge.  All the pieces are middle pieces.  It’s kind of like asking for an Oreo cookie without the cookie part.  Admit it, you know you wanted to.  Just the middle please!

Each edge of the puzzle pieces has either a knob or a socket with each piece having 2 of each on opposite edges.  The knobs and sockets come in either single or double size and can be located in the left, right, or center position, or in the case of the double size, 2 adjacent positions, which always includes the center. And unlike a typical jigsaw puzzle, the pieces don’t have a designated top and bottom, so they can go either way.

The first stage of attacking this puzzle is to rule out some often-used packing tricks.  After getting those out of the way, you basically know how the pieces are going to be packed in the tray.  I was anticipating an expected Aha while pondering whether the Aha was that there wasn’t an Aha.  Trying both Aha and meta-Aha assemblies, I eventually found myself at the solution – Ahahaha!

Being a puzzle designer myself, after I solved the puzzle, just for the hell of it, for no particular reason at all, not that I would ever think about it myself, I checked the kerf angle of the pieces to determine if they were all aligned with the orientation of the solved puzzle and it looked to me like it was.  So don’t cheat and orient the pieces based on the kerf angle, not that you would ever think to do that.  This isn’t a real problem with laser-cut cut pieces like 4 Piece Jigsaw since you really have to go out of your way to determine which way the kerf angle is oriented, but it’s a huge problem if you 3D print the pieces where there is an obvious plate side and top side.

4 Piece Jigsaw is the first of a series of jigsaw puzzles designed by Haym and available at Nothing Yet Designs.  JIGS4W (all 4 pieces are the same color) appears to be the new name for 4 Piece Jigsaw and the next 2 in the series are JIG5AW (3 sets of 5 pieces) and J1GSAW (10 pieces).