A Very Attractive Puzzle – Tetracore

Sometimes you find yourself drawn towards a very attractive puzzle (I confess that I sometimes confuse sometimes with often).  Tetracore is one of those very attractive puzzles.  It consists of a stellar core surrounded by 14 heavenly satellites that have been captured in orbit.  In fact, the orbital shell is completely full and there is no room for additional satellites.  And as attractive as this puzzle is, needless to say, the satellites find each other repelling.

Tetracore was designed by Jared McComb and made by Brian Menold at Wood Wonders.  It includes a 2x2x2 core with 4 magnets on each of the 6 faces.  The satellites are the 7 exotic planer tetracubes, T, O, I, L, and Z, and the mirror images of L and Z.  There are 2 of each and the top face of each has 4 magnets except for I, which has 2 since the outer cubes can never be in contact with the core.  76 magnets in all!

With all those magnets, Tetracore begs to be played with.  Whether you solve it or not, it’s meditative to just sit and snap the pieces to the core.  You can even push them from one state to another.

During the solve, I was surprised at the number of times I was left with a tetracube void that didn’t match the last tetracube in hand.  Sometimes they were the mirror of each other.  I also ended up in situations where the core was completely covered with no external magnets to capture remaining satellites.

Sadly, I eventually ended up with a celestial body in equilibrium.  But wait, looking back at the description on Wood Wonders’ site, there are 5 symmetrical solutions in addition to non-symmetrical ones and mine lacked celestial harmony.  Yay!  More fiddling time on the event horizon.

Celestial Tetracube Being