SPIR ALA Rips

Not sure what the name means but Vesa Timonen seems to have done it again. Again just two pieces  but this time with one hole in each piece. The goal is to place the pieces flat on a table such that the resulting shape can be bisected into two identical shapes. I absolutely had no luck with this one but did however enjoy the nice strong woody scent emanating from the Curly Birch used to produce this puzzle.

French Revolution

French colours adorned here of course. Consisting of four pieces, one blue and three red, the goal is to form three possible symmetrical shapes using a combination of the blue piece and any two of the three red pieces. As of this post, I only managed to  find one of the  three possible solutions. Like the name suggest, I kept going round in circles to no avail. The other two shapes have eluded me thus far.

3 Pieces 9 symmetric shapes

A straight forward self-explanatory name for the puzzle but this one is anything by straight forward. And the puzzle consist of only three pieces. The goal is to form 9 symmetric shapes but after two days of play, I managed only to form 3 shapes…a rather dismal result percentage if I may add.

SYM-353

Now this one is from me, yes! SYM-353 was my exchange puzzle at IPP37. Why the “353”? Well, it consist of three pieces; two with 3 sides and one with 5 sides. Sym 353 was a  design collaboration between Stanislav Knot of the Czech Republic and me. My original design had just one solution (as I intended). But Stan saw my design and thought the three pieces could form another symmetrical shape. With some adjustments to the shapes, this proved to be true. Little did we realise that there were two more possible solutions when I sent the puzzle to Ken Johnson of Canada and Rex Perez of Philippines for testing. Each of them came up with a new and different solution, resulting in a total of 4 possible solutions.

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Designed by Laszlo Molnar, the puzzle is made out of Cherry (I have one of Laszlo’s earlier puzzlers, the very nice L-I-Vator Cube). The puzzle comes with not one but two solutions. Unlike the increasingly popular 2D form-a-symmetric-shape type puzzles such as the award winning Symmetrick and others like 3 Pentagons which are slowly catching on with a number  of designers including myself, Twisted Sisters here requires the solutions to be in 3D symmetric shapes. This ups the challenge ante quite a bit, but not to say 2D symmetrical puzzles are easy to begin with. It depends on the number of pieces and the design.

As you can see from the photo, the pieces look very similar and in the early stages I found myself placing the pieces together in all the different ways I can think of…while each attempt yielded a sort of symmetrical solution, it turned out not to be. Finally I found one which I thought was most likely a right solution and promptly shot a Facebook message to Theo with a photo to ask him to confirm if I had indeed gotten it correct. I was very happy to hear from him that I found one of the two correct solutions. Apologies I can’t show the solutions here so as not to create any spoilers. I didn’t continue with my search for the second over nearly two weeks (while away on vacation) and when I got back to the puzzle again and found what I thought could be the second correct solution, off another message to Theo for confirmation. He has yet to reply given it’s Christmas day today and he’s probably caught up in the festivities. But I do hope my second solution is correct.

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