Saturday 6 February 2021

Lensch Lovelies

Another little treasure from my recent haul of Lensch Lovelies – this time a Magic Box with a surprise inside it.

The Magic Box is a neat, unassuming design from Oskar. The box comes apart into six faces, each with a pair of edges attaches to it, somewhere. 

All you need to do to assemble the box is find the right combination of faces and edges to put together so that when you get down to the last piece remaining, the gaps left on the cube just happen to coincide with the layout of the piece you have in your other hand.

As you might expect from Oskar, there are a lot of ways to not do this one… and end up with mismatching edges and gaps.

The edges on this one are Black Limba and the faces are made of a lovely Bloodwood – it looks stunning.

Open up this box and you’ll find an East Indian Rosewood copy of Coffin’s Half Hour puzzle – so-called because it will probably provide at least half an hour’s worth of puzzling – or considerably more if you’re as inept as I am most days!

The Half Hour puzzle is six-piece 3*3*3 cube dissection with a unique solution – derived by the master designer to provide the best challenge possible in a 3*3*3 cube. 

It won’t disappoint and you’ll invariably find yourself wondering how the heck six such simple little pieces can defy your attempts at recreating a simple little cube for that long.

As you’d expect from Tom, they both not only look stunning, but the fit is as perfect as you could possible wish for… a lovely addition to the hoard!

4 comments:

  1. 3x3x3 polycube puzzles are very overlooked. There’s a good reason Stewart named if the Half Hour Puzzle. It’s so easy to glue up a full set of pentacubes, the three non-planar tetracubes, and a dicube. Then you have Rik’s Cube Kit, Warson’s Flat Out, and over 2,000 combinations using the non-planar pentacubes and a dicube. And there are more nice ones like Goetz’s Tea Time 3 puzzles.

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  2. Yup - your brain tells you it should be simple at "just" 3*3*3 ... and yet...! :-)

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  3. And one of my favourites is Reticulated Cubes by Lee Sallows (made by Eric F: https://cubicdissection.com/collections/discontinued-work/products/reticulated-cubes-assembly-puzzle). Not only to solve the eight cube challenges, but also to arrange the nine pieces in a magic square array. A mathematician's delight! -Tyler.

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    1. Yeah, great shout Tyler! LOVE the etra layer in solving the magic square too...

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