Not a Little Challenge – Monster

What a cute little puzzle!  It only has 3 little pieces that you have to put in a frame.  Bwahahahaha!

So how do you define a Monster puzzle?  81 moves to put the last piece in?  A total of 105 moves to solve with 81 moves to put the last piece in?  Over 1000 moves to solve a 105 move puzzle with 81 moves to put the last piece in?  Over 6 hours to perform over 1000 moves to solve a 105 move puzzle with 81 moves to put the last piece in?

Monster was designed by Girish Sharma and made by Tom Lensch using Mahogany and Maple.  The pieces are constructed with doweled joints to strengthen them although you really shouldn’t need to test their durability.  The tolerances are perfect and if you’re using force, you’re doing something wrong.  I also appreciate that the puzzle arrived unassembled so that I could enjoy the full solving experience.

Although I really didn’t have any time to allocate for working on the puzzle when it arrived, I got sucked in and spent 1-2 hours fiddling with it after I took it out of the box.  2 days later, I had a couple of spare minutes and sat down work on it for a bit.  Once again I disappeared into the puzzle zone to finally reappear 5 hours later with a solved puzzle.  Yes, this is a real thing.  During a good solve, you slip out of normal space-time into the mind-bending puzzle continuum where all your senses are laser-focused on a single objective.  I once had someone apologize a couple of hours after putting a puzzle in my hand.  Too bad I couldn’t hear him.

This puzzle may only require 105 moves but I’m sure that it took me over 1000 moves to solve.  Maybe 2000.  I have to say that for a 3 piece framed puzzle, it was a challenge to solve.  However, I already knew that Girish's goal was to exceed the movement count of Climburr (50+ moves for the first piece).  It took me thousands of moves so I can't attest if the 81.19.5 level is accurate or not, but it looks about right.  As tough as it was, I enjoyed working on it.  It's not as hopelessly impossible as it first appears.  I pretty much knew what I had to accomplish at each step even though accomplishing each step was not easy.

I 4 1 thought Monster is a tough but fair puzzle.  The big unknown for me was the order of introducing the pieces to the cage.  I was fortunate in that my educated guess worked out.  However, I can't be sure that other orders wouldn't work just as well.  All the rotations that I made were well behaved, but there was one that was more than a simple rotate to add some spice in the solving process.

The first step in tackling this Monster is to determine the final configuration of the pieces within the frame.  This was not difficult and was greatly appreciated.  For each of the 3 pieces, you pretty much know where they go and how they are oriented within the frame.  You only need to determine how to move them around to get them in place.  During this process, I found that all 3 pieces are (mostly – hahaha) in 1 of 2 orientations, rotated and unrotated.  And you will be going back and forth between them, more than once, many times, so many times.

Having solved this Monster, the puzzle fibers that comprise my body were definitely sated.  I even thought my 6-7 hour solve time was quite respectable until I found out that someone else had solved it in a few hours while watching TV.  Sigh.