Smuggler

Designer: Lucie Pauwels

This puzzle measures: 112 mm x 112 mm x 26 mm

Material: Ovangkol/Maple

Kevin Sadler wrote about it:
“This lovely puzzle from Lucie Pauwels looks very straightforward when delivered. Just a tray packing puzzle with some very attractive pieces made from Ovangkol to be packed into a standard square Maple tray. It is a lovely size to play with at a table (11.5cm across in a 3 layer deep tray). Only when you look at the pieces closely do you realise that there is something odd about some of them – they are 3 layers high and when they are looked at from a particular direction, there seems to be notches in them each of which is a single vowel in size. There are 8 pieces each having 1 voxel missing and then four 2 voxel bars to be inserted alongside them. Tipping the pieces out of the tray reveals the full extent of Lucie’s madness and what is going to be required. Smugglers have often buried their treasure to keep it away from competitors and the authorities so that they can come back to it at a later date. Here we need to place all the pieces in the tray so that they lie flush with the edges. Then we need to find a way to repeat it but with the gold (Maple) bars inside and hidden. To do this will require solving the packing with the notches in the middle layer to be organised so that they line up with 4 2×1 voxel gaps.
 
I first of all set to work on just the main pieces and ignored the gold bars. I found quite a few assemblies for this and, after playing with Burrtools, discovered that there are 168 ways to do this. I then worked on adding first one and them progressively more of the bars. Placing just one was relatively trivial once a packing for the main pieces had been found. Placing a second one, at least for me, did not seem much tougher. I have been trying to assemble the packed tray with 3 of the 4 bars now for a day or so and have so far failed. I am sure there is some logic to it but I haven’t yet worked it out. Burrtools tells me there are 30 solutions. The final challenge with all 4 bars has just one solution. I expect this to take me the rest of my life! For you tray packers, this might just be an essential purchase.”