Something new from Two Brass Monkeys

This won’t be a long blog post, but hopefully it will be useful, if only to the small group of thoroughly masochistic puzzlers out there…

Ali and Steve have a new hexagonal stick puzzle out – as you’d expect it’s made with plenty of brass and weighs a fair bit… it resulted from their somewhat exhaustive analysis for their Joy of Hex project when they noticed that 12 copies of one particular piece would build neatly into a standard Hectix cluster.

The downside was that it would spontaneously fall apart if not supported well in a number of different planes… which doesn’t bode well for a puzzle design…

However, the Monkeys aren’t easily cowed by mere gravity and analysed further to discover that if the pieces are combined into sets of handed pairs (two this-way and four that-), the resultant assembly is not only stable under standard Earth gravity, but is an absolute pig to assemble using the usual number of hands a solo puzzler can provide.

Thus was born the Tricky Hand Job – if you like your puzzles to be infuriating, this one’s for you! Get them while they’re still warm.

…and as a final bonus, it will fly apart with a gentle spin of the assembly on a table – a fantastic way to wipe the smile off any smug puzzler who’s just solved their copy – NOT that I’d ever encourage such dastardly behaviour!