I thought that I would try something a little meatier now that I'm all warmed up.
I had k3DW come by the shop today, to have a peek at some of the puzzles that I collected, so I decided that now was a good time as ever to try something a bit out of my comfort zone. The puzzle that landed in my crosshairs was Tyler Somer's Six Xis.
I warmed up with two easier puzzles: Free Your Emotions (as easy as it looks), and Elytra by Andrei Ivanov. The Elytra is actually quite interesting, and rather different to a regular co-mo puzzle. I've uploaded
a short video showing part of the solution so you can see what I mean.
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| Can't be bothered to lighten this in Lightroom, sorry.You won't be getting spoiled by me on this blog... |
The puzzle consists of six identical pieces of wood, each approximating the Greek lowercase
ΞΎ. They appear to be made of solid wood blocks (probably using a Dado blade), which is quite nice. The wood seems to be a type of pine, though I can't be sure. It's fairly soft, regardless. Tyler designed, made, and exchanged the puzzle.
The clear plastic case contains four pieces in a square arrangement and two resting separately beside it. The objective is to create a 3x3 lattice arrangement.
I opened up the box, started sort of randomly throwing the pieces together, and it's not difficult to find an arrangement that works for them all to fit together. The problem lies in actually constructing the arrangement. I seem to recall Tyler saying that BurrTools would not help in solving; indeed, there's a little card with the hint that there are rotations involved. In the solution that I found, slight spoiler,
there are actually two sort of simultaneous rotations necessary to solve the puzzle. Knowing that, I found a situation where rotations were useful, so I played around with that for a bit. With this first situation, you can get very very close to assembling it, but not quite there. It took around 10 more minutes of wiggling around before I was able to create the lattice arrangement. There are actually 96 solutions (according to the card that came with), and there's another challenge on the card but I haven't quite figured out what it means or how I might go about accomplishing it.
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| The grain pattern is oddly satisfying |
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| Original packaging |
I opened up the box, started sort of randomly throwing the pieces together, and it's not difficult to find an arrangement that works for them all to fit together. The problem lies in actually constructing the arrangement. I seem to recall Tyler saying that BurrTools would not help in solving; indeed, there's a little card with the hint that there are rotations involved. In the solution that I found, slight spoiler, there are actually two sort of simultaneous rotations necessary to solve the puzzle. Knowing that, I found a situation where rotations were useful, so I played around with that for a bit. With this first situation, you can get very very close to assembling it, but not quite there. It took around 10 more minutes of wiggling around before I was able to create the lattice arrangement. There are actually 96 solutions (according to the card that came with), and there's another challenge on the card but I haven't quite figured out what it means or how I might go about accomplishing it.
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