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6-Board Burr
I would never have thought that an aesthetically pleasing puzzle could be made from layered three quarter inch blockboard. These pieces, five inches long, have been precision cut and then, I think, stained.
I’ve never successfully assembled this puzzle, but I am fairly sure that it can be assembled like a normal burr, with three pairs of pieces lying together, two in each plane. Each piece is initially 8 units by 4.
All pieces have a four by two central area, with two pieces being totally voided, two missing 7 units and two missing six units. Five pieces have a single unit ‘entrance’ and one has a double width entrance. To protect the designer’s copyright I have not pictured all the pieces, just enough to give the general idea.
This puzzle is, as I hinted earlier, very much harder than a standard six piece burr. There are times when just three pieces seem to get inextricably tangled. It is very much a 3D sliding puzzle as much as an assembly puzzle. Because of the relative simplicity of the cut-outs in each piece, analysis software shows that there are over 4,056 ways of forming these six pieces into the solution shape, out of 4096 permutations, but this does not give any guide as to how many of these are achievable.
Looking closely at the central 2x2x2 space at the centre of a (hypothetically) solved position, there are actually only 5 cubes in that space, the rest being empty. This is why there are so many apparent solutions. I have a similar puzzle, from the same designer, that I have never had the courage to take apart!! It is a delightfully complex puzzle, with it being very difficult, not only to devise a plan, but it is also a struggle to keep the plan in mind after a few wrong slides and pushes!
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