Cerberus

Girish Sharma entered a couple of puzzles in last year’s Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition and was duly awarded an Honourable Mention for one of them – I rather enjoyed playing with that one and promptly modelled it and printed off a copy for myself… and then enticed a couple of others to play with it and they seemed to enjoy it too… so when I spotted another of his designs appearing in a recent Pelikan release, I promptly added it to the basket.

Cerberus is a neat little 4*4*4 (partial) cube that consists of a wenge ring-shaped piece and three interlocking pieces that are well and truly trapped inside that ring. It’s not challenging finding a couple of pieces that will move, but unless you’re really lucky, you’re going to find yourself trapped up against a dead end… once or twice… I wasn’t lucky – many times!

Find your way past said dead ends and you’ll get into a most wonderful dance of those three little trapped pieces – I know we often use that term to describe the relative movements of pieces in puzzles, but this one really is a rather intricate dance with pieces going round and back and forth until at the 25^th move, the first piece is released… and even from there things aren’t trivial to release the last two pieces.

I got to watch a few folks fiddling with it at the last MPP and that confirmed that even when you’ve disassembled it, putting it back together is anything but trivial – amusingly most people seemed to struggle with putting the first piece into the frame! (Think about that!)

An excellent design that packs a whole lot of puzzling into an innocent-looking little cube. Definitely worth having a play with this one if you enjoy interlocking cubes!