Minima Ronde

I wonder if Frederic Boucher had any idea just how ubiquitous his Minima form-factor would become when he started toying with his first few designs. It’s seen some truly mind-blowing “simple” packing puzzles that are anything but straight-forward from Frederic himself… then he’s given us some wonderfully complicated sequential discovery puzzles. And then he’s also invited a bunch of other designers onto the bandwagon to bring us their take on the 2*2*3 space.

Volker Latussek had already dabbled in the space with Minima Flop using standard cubie-pieces and decided to have another bash with pieces that each have one full cubie and two half cubies. Six such pieces will neatly fill the standard Minima box and then some judiciously carved holes will turn it into a rather neat little puzzle.

As with all of Volker’s puzzles, the shipping configuration is designed to tease the puzzler and this one comes with an interesting little challenge – you can’t just shake the pieces out of the box… so it begins.

Retrieve the pieces and you can fiddle around with them outside the box and get to know them a little… you’ll spot that some of them are handed-copies and that will restrict the potential assemblies a fair bit.

Having found an assembly, reverse-engineering how the heck you can get them into the box is a wonderful challenge. I really enjoyed this bit of the solve – Volker’s given you a whole bunch of holes and it turns out that every single one of them is important… there’s a wonderfully convoluted series of moves required to get everything inside and quite often you’re having to fiddle around with the order of insertion because your initial assumptions are going to be proved wrong!

I found myself stopped in my tracks a few times as I had to reassess and find a way around something that seemed impossible… for six little pieces, this one packs a whole lot of puzzling and some ingenious moves to get everything in just the right spot.

Another superb challenge added to the canon!