What's New?
Another new puzzle from Binary Arts is That-A-Way, a totally novel approach to edge matching puzzles, which do tend to get a bit monotonous after a while. This breathes new life into that old chestnut, and is wonderfully brain-twisting, not surprising therefore to see Serhiy Grabarchuk's name in the list of credits. There are ten ways of arranging pairs of arrows pointing N, S, E or West on domino cards. Arrange the ten cards to match the range of target diagrams. Puzzles vary from Tricky to Nightmare. This is really worth a look, and you can play online, or even print out your own set with their permission! This diagram is a challenge of my own design, using the 10 cards to form a capital M. | While looking for a UK outlet for That-A-Way, I found Happy Puzzle who sell all the Binary Arts range by post-free mail order, as well as many other puzzles for all ages. They also do custom-printed foam cubes. I placed an order via the net on Monday, and the goods arrived Wednesday. The website did require me to reconfigure my cookie options, though. |
One minor recent solving success was the dismemberment and reconstruction of a small 12-piece Hikimi penguin, a souvenir of August's visit to Hakone Mountain in Japan. |
Another failure was my latest attempt to solve Tucker's Tormentor, a 5x5x5 cube assembly, with 9 truly awesome pieces, some of which are shown. |
The 12 pentominoes are easily identified by using the letters which they most resemble. FILNPTUVWXYZ. Kate Jones of Kadon Enterprises has developed an extensive and fairly logical series of conventions for naming the 8 tetracubes, 17 non-planar pentacubes, 35 planar hexacubes and 131 non-planar hexacubes. A logical naming convention is very useful to help identify each piece. Andrew Clark on his excellent Polyforms site has compact pictures of the 131 non-planar hexacubes. (Follow Polycubes - Hexacubes - 131 pieces). I spent a couple of mind-twisting hours correllating Kate's names with Andrew's images and produced a table to link the two together. My friend Fred is nearing the end of his Herculean task of making me a set of the hexacubes. I look forward to the day I can try to assemble them into a 10x10x10 cube along with a square tetracube. The pieces shown are all L-pentacube derivatives from Fred's set. |
I discovered Frank Potts' Pottypuzzles a new web-only UK puzzle supplier. Frank has numerous disentanglement puzzles, and some sliding puzzles. |