Thursday, I came home from work, happy that it was the end of my workweek, to find this gem sitting in my mailbox. As you can see from the pics in this post, there are fourteen triangular and vertex-shaped pieces that can be twisted around each other any number of ways. Each piece is tiled, not stickered like some other puzzles. It’s very well-made and feels very solid in weight, movement and construction. I ordered it at Mefferts.com for eighteen bucks; I think over half of that went towards the shipping cost!

Due to the nature of the shape and cuts of the pyramid, the tips don’t move (only rotate) and everything else revolves around the center vertexes. This means that , despite the cool design, it’s not at all hard to solve. The minimal difficulty notwithstanding, I’m still happy with it. I’ll have fun trying to unearth its small secrets, making patterns and endeavouring to bring my solve time down. Just to let you know how easy it is to solve, I took it out of the box, showed it to the wife, mixed it up, set it down for a few minutes… and then solved it a few minutes later! In terms of difficulty, it’s really like a glorified 2×2 cube, much as a Megaminx is little more than a glorified Rubik’s Cube.

Well, I’ll be looking around for more possibilities to add to the collection. I think I’m ready for two difficult puzzles. One is the Pyraminx Crystal, which is in the final drafting stages before production at Meffert’s puzzle shop. I can’t wait for this one to be available soon! The other is either going to be a 20 color Dogic VI puzzle or a 12 color Dogic I. Before I go further, I’ll answer Travis’ comment (on my last entry) with this: yes, I’m definitely interested in a Sudokucube! That one, you have to work out where all the numbers are going to go in advance before using a 3×3x3 solution. In fact, I’m thinking of buying replacement number stickersets to put on one of my spare cubes! But I digress… Anyways, I’m in sore need of a new challenge.

Cheers! (And I still hope someone mass-produces the Gigaminx puzzle!)

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 11:30 pm and is filed under Puzzles, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.