Polyhex, Butterflies, Jupiter

We've been working on some new puzzles and also livestreaming lasercutting and solving puzzles. We now have a Twitch account where we have been going live each Thursday night starting at 7:30pm EST to solve a puzzle. During the middle of the week, we also stream our lasercutter as it cuts the puzzle we are solving that week. If you follow us on Twitch you will get notified whenever we go live: https://www.twitch.tv/nervouspuzzles. Now onto the new puzzle designs.

Polyhex Math Puzzle

The first puzzle we are working on is a Polyhex puzzle. It's more of a math puzzle than a jigsaw puzzle. The puzzle pieces consist of all the shapes you can make from 5 hexagons. There are 4 colors of pieces. It will ship with a book of scenarios for you to solve. We feel like it's the puzzle equivalent of doing a sudoku or crossword puzzle. Just doing the puzzle on it's own can feel impossible but solving the hinted scenarios gives it a nice challenge. There will be puzzle scenarios to solve with different levels of difficulty. There are other polyhex puzzles out there but I think ours is unique due to the 4-coloring and the book of play scenarios. Still need to come up with a name. This will come in a wood tray with an acrylic top (connected by magnets).

While developing the puzzle, we realized that it was kind of too easy if you just want to fit all the pieces in. There are millions of solutions, and with the right strategy finding one takes 20-30 minutes. And once you find one, there isn’t much of a reason to find another. Interestingly, when you add the coloring rule (no same color pieces can touch), there are still hundreds of thousands of solutions, but the puzzle becomes nearly impossible to complete on your own. There seems to be a curve where if there are very few possible solutions, it is easy because there are so many constraints, and if there are very many solutions it is also easy because most moves work, but in the middle becomes incredibly challenging. So we’re developing a set of partial solutions where there is only one way to fit in the remaining pieces. In this way, the puzzle comes with a set of mini puzzles which should take 15 minutes to 2 hours to complete. Ultimately, the dream would be to create an app where you could design your own scenarios and try to complete them. It would work by pointing your camera at a partially completed puzzle, and it would tell you if there is a solution.

Anyone have name ideas? Basically any combination of hex, hexagon and puzzle have already been taken by other games.

Butterfly puzzles

I've long been obsessed with the insect illustrations of Emile-Allain Seguy, a French artist known for his Art Nouveau and Art Deco drawings of plants and bugs created in the 1920's. His works recently came into the public domain so we've decided to create a series of puzzles from his Papillons (Butterflies). You can view the full book at Biodiversity Heritage Library. These will be shaped puzzles with drop outs and many butterfly and moth-shaped pieces. I think the one on the right will come in a larger size. Here's a photo of our first pass. Each has a different cut style: maze, matrix and coral.

 Jupiter Puzzle

We wanted to make another Infinity Puzzle along the lines of our Earth and Moon Puzzles and came across a new high resolution image of Jupiter. We're using the matrix cut for this one. We've testing both UV printing and paper printing for this design and the paper printing works so much better for preserving the fine details of the swirling gas clouds. We tried flattening the Jupiter image using the same icosahedral mapping we employed for the Earth Puzzle but it makes the bands of color on the planet look wavy so we've decided to flatten Jupiter using a cubic mapping which preserves the linear bands. The photo below shows a sample puzzle cut done with UV printing (right) vs a paper print from our photo printer (left). The photo printer option is clearly superior for this puzzle.