YOGA I

Designer: Benjamin Heidt

This puzzle measures: 72 mm x 56 mm x 51 mm

Material: Leopard/Garapa

Benjamin Heidt wrote about it:
“With YOGA I, Pelikan has sensationally brought my latest masterpiece to life. You might think, “not another packing puzzle!” However, the name itself hints at the fun to be had. Not only will your brain be bent and stretched while solving it, but the pieces themselves will be too. They are so simple – 8 identical pieces, each consisting of 4 cubes. The clever part is that two of the 4 cubes in each piece are connected by an axis. This allows each piece to take on 4 possible shapes. If the box didn’t already contain fixed blocks, the challenge would be practically nonexistent. As it is, the task is to find the only possible combination of shapes and then fit it into the box. An absolutely tricky business. I’m proud that Pelikan didn’t hesitate long and that together we were able to give the puzzle such an appealing look.”

Kevin Sadler wrote about it:
“This unbelievably complex design by Benjamin Heidt has been made by Pelikan to look incredibly beautiful using stunningly marked Leopardwood for the panels of the box and Garapa for the pieces as well as the corners of the box. Benjamin has picked 4 of the possible tetrominoes to be placed in the box which already has 4 voxels stuck in place inside and then deliberately not told us which tetrominoes he has chosen – he (and Pelikan) have obfuscated the puzzle even further by creating a hinge across each pair of dominoes and allowing the poor challenged puzzler to rotate the pieces into any of the 4 possible shapes. My goodness! This is hard enough if we were given all the correct pieces in the correct shapes to be inserted. By adding the hinges the puzzle has been made MUCH tougher! This is not for the faint-hearted.
 
Creating a Burrtools file for this puzzle is a challenge in itself – it will require you to know about how to use variable numbers of pieces (it is actually a great way to educate yourself into the more complex aspects of the program). Once this has been done it can be seen that there are 268 ways to insert these different combinations of these tetrominoes inside the box but only 1 is actually possible to create as a true solution. Amazingly it requires at least 1 of every type of tetromino (I’m not telling you how many of which ones). I have been working on this for many hours and have so far not managed to get anywhere at all. I suspect that I will need to go back to BT and find out how many of each piece type is required and try with that knowledge.”