Prison

Designer: Lucie Pauwels

This puzzle measures: 60 mm x 60 mm x 60 mm

Material: Bubinga/Maple

Lucie Pauwels wrote about it:

“The Prison is a puzzle with 7 pieces. The pieces must be placed in the frame in a way that no pieces can fall out in any direction when the frame is closed with the magnetic cover. Pelikan made a beautiful version of this puzzle in 2 contrasting woods.”

Kevin Sadler wrote about it:

“There is something compulsive about the packing puzzle designs from Lucie Pauwels! This wonderful little challenge has been beautifully created by Pelikan with a wonderfully contrasting Bubinga frame (prison) and white Maple pieces. The prison consists of a simple 3x3x3 cube but is made much more complex by the addition of a single voxel hole in the floor and ceiling which also have to be filled – on top of that the openings to be fed through are partially obscured on all sides leaving a 2×3 gap on each face. The pieces are a variety of small simple shapes – there are 7 pieces in all to be placed in the prison. I thought initially that this should not be terribly difficult but the slightly limited entry and the need to fill ceiling and floor holes turns this into a proper challenge. Burrtools tells me that there are 151 possible assemblies and I struggled to find even one of them! I think it must have taken me a good 30-45 minutes to get my first one. Working outside the box as is traditional was not helpful as it is really hard to hold the pieces in place as you progressively add more of them. I was forced to work in the prison to use the prison bars to hold the pieces as I added extras. I frequently seemed to be making progress only to either have a final shape impossible to add into the puzzle due to blocking walls or the final gaps were split into several shapes. I had to use a bit of thought to work out an initial approach and then a lot of trial and error to get the first assembly. There is plenty of repeatability here to look for different assemblies.

Late update!!!!
Having posted my article, I was contacted by Lucie to tell me that I had completely misunderstood the nature of the puzzle! I had assumed that this was a packing puzzle but I can now tell you that the packing element is a secondary challenge (and not even the toughest challenge). It would appear that the top surface of the prison is held on with rather strong magnets and it can be lifted off to give very good access to the cavity of the prison. The true aim is to place all the inmates inside the prison and then replace the roof. This sounds easy and it really is BUT the pieces need to be placed in such a way that once the roof is back on, the pieces cannot slide out. Yes this is an anti-slide puzzle and looks like a very difficult one. I will need to go back to it soon.”