Den 3

Designer: Osanori Yamamoto

This puzzle measures: 64 mm x 64 mm x 64 mm

Material: Acacia / Padauk

Kevin Sadler wrote about it:

“In this packing puzzle designed by Osanori Yamamoto the aim, as usual is to assemble the pieces (3 of them this time, made from Padauk) into the nice chunky Acacia box. I must point out the incredible detail that Jakub and team have put into the box – Acacia is a relatively plain wood in terms of colour but with having very nice grain and shading. To make this one even more spectacular the top and bottom faces have been assembled with a diagonal line of differently placed cubes of wood – this makes this wonderful puzzle even more precious for a man addicted to gorgeous wood! The cavity of the box is the usual 3x3x3 cube but, with this one, the areas that must be occluded by the pieces are quite extensive over quite a lot of the puzzle which should limit the number of possibilities to go through. I used Burrtools to count the possible assemblies after I solved it and there are 124 ways to assemble a cube from the 3 pieces of this puzzle but when restricting the positions to allow the occlusion of the holes, this number shrinks down to a more reasonable 22. This number is still too high for me to go through and try them all (I find that I can’t remember what I have tried after just 3 or 4 attempts) and necessitates using the restricted entry to significantly decrease the cubes to be tried. The solution of this took me an embarrassingly long time to find. I think I played with this on and off for 4 or 5 evenings before I found a cube that met all my criteria and then really struggled to place the pieces inside the box. I ended up solving it outside the box starting from cube shape and attempting all the moves that should be possible and gradually dismantled the cube. It should not be that difficult with just 3 pieces but I kept getting stuck 10 or 12 moves in. The disassembly of this puzzle has an incredible level 26 (19.4.3) – if you do manage to solve this then you can be very chuffed at your puzzling prowess.”