LITTLE-TETRA-FLOP

Designer: Dr. Volker Latussek

This puzzle measures: 90 mm x 70 mm x 50 mm

Material: Wenge/Am. Cherry

Dr. Volker Latussek wrote about it: 

“I had already announced LITTLE-TETRA-FLOP with the release of my little series of FLOPs in honor of the high jump technique and its athletes: Fritz Pingl, Dick Fosbury and Stefka Kostadinowa. I had presented TETRA-FLOP as an encore and apologised for the additional opening. However, the included moves with the complete set of eight tetra cubes ultimately led to the publication and the extremely positive response has now led to LITTLE-TETRA-FLOP. With DICK-FLOP, I was able to choose one of the two possible openings to completely fill the box (3x4x2) with a specific selection of six tetra cubes. For the other opening on the long side, a small additional opening on the side was needed to create a very nice and surprising packing sequence with a unique solution. For this, the set of five KAMELLE pieces had to be supplemented with a sixth tetra cube. The choice of woods corresponds to that of PETIT SUCRIER according to Frederic Boucher’s wishes. I would like to thank Frederic once again for the friendly and very stimulating exchange. Perhaps one day Pelikan will also publish my MINIMA-FLOP. A result of this interaction.”

Kevin Sadler wrote about it:

“This fabulous new challenge from Dr Volker Latussek continues the wonderful Flop series but showing that he can now see the benefits of the side holes over the loss of purity from an incomplete box. Pelikan has created this beauty out of Wenge and American Cherry, keeping the 4×1 piece outside of the box (which is 4x3x2 voxels with a 1½ voxel deep entry postbox on top).

The first challenge is to work out how to remove the pieces from the box. As we all know, Volker designs both the puzzle and the delivery conformation to be a challenge and this one really takes it to the max – it took me a good 30 minutes to get all the pieces free. I love this aspect of these puzzles. Having taken them out, you now have 6 of the usual set of tetrominoes to put back in using the trademark flop moves.

First thing to do is find the possible assemblies of which there are 14. Obviously the restricted entry helps limit the numbers and you also need to decide whether Volker would stoop so low as to use the side hole of the box to place the last piece. So how should you go about narrowing down the assemblies? I got slightly lucky and managed it after a few hours of trying random positions before realising that the most important thing to do was to leave enough space for the insertion of the pieces that can only be rotated into the box. The Aha! moment is wonderful with this puzzle. It’s yet another example of Volker’s genius mind. It’s not too horrendous and is very very clever. Having solved it, I then had to try and find the delivery assembly all over again. Brilliant fun!”