Juno has proved that
he’s more than capable of producing fun, accessible puzzles that you
could safely toss at a muggle without fear of embarrassing them – he
also has a knack for designing some proper-hard puzzles…and
for the record, I place his Grooved 6 Board Burr #1 very squarely in
the latter category.
Juno’s been playing with Board Burr designs for many, many years… but this one’s from another planet!
A quick look at it in
its assembled state and you can’t fail to notice a couple of tracks
routed on some of the faces… along with what appear to be the back ends
of some pegs that might just be travelling in
those tracks. Mercifully there are some exits visible on the edges… but
you just know that they’re not going to be anywhere near where you
might actually want them to be, don’t you?!
Disassembly is a
reasonable challenge: those pins and tracks serious restrict your
movement options, and yet, there are several ways of making strange
shapes and expanding things WITHOUT any of the pieces coming
anywhere near actually coming apart. From an assembled state, this
puzzle has a lot of blind alleys to explore… I have the t-shirt!
Time and again I’d find
a new way of getting things to almost come apart only to find that
there was no way to progress – this thing’s fiendish!
…and when I did
eventually get it apart, I just knew that there was no way in heck it
was ever going back together again without one of two things: either the
supplied solution from Juno or a BurrTools model
built by my fair hand…
I opted for the latter,
and I’m not ashamed! … BurrTools reckons there are 6,653
possibly assemblies for these pieces… that is WAY TOO MANY blind alleys
for me to have to explore – Sod’s law dictates
that I’d need to explore every single one of them (some of them more
than once without realising it!) before I managed to find the one trust
path… BurrTools is a much more direct route! ... and even then we're talking 39 moves: 22.6.5...
I told you this thing was from another planet!
PS There's still a handful available over here.
I told you this thing was from another planet!
PS There's still a handful available over here.
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