Triadenspass & Quadrospass

Here are a couple of cheap little packing puzzles designed by Ingo Uhl and made by the German company Logika. They are two puzzles that look essentially the same although they do vary quite a bit in difficulty.

This first one is called Triadenspass (or Triadenfun) and it is a simple little three-piece packing puzzle made from plastic that was designed by Ingo Uhl in 1999. The object is to pack all of the three pieces into their plastic tray.

It's kind of hard to tell from the picture but if you look really closely you can see that the edges of the pieces do have a sort of wavy pattern to them, and this corresponds with wavy edges that are also on the plastic tray. You will be surprised how many ways there are to almost solve this puzzle. As several edges have the same or similar patterns it is hard to be certain that a piece is in the correct place until you have placed all three of them. This is why it is not possible to solve this packing puzzle outside of it's case, because although the pieces may fit together perfectly there is a good chance that they won't also fit into their cases.

This four-piece variation called Quadrospass (or Quadrofun) is essentially the same puzzle. It was also designed by Ingo Uhl, except it was two years later in 2001. It's also manufactured from plastic and is exactly the same size as Triadenspass.

It is amazing how much difference it makes to the difficulty by simply splitting one of the rhombic pieces into two triangles.

I would say that neither of these puzzles are particularly difficult, and they won't keep an 'educated' puzzler perplexed for very long, but they are a great little puzzle to hand over for other people to try out. You would have a hard time breaking them, they're nice and flat (portable), and although the solution isn't difficult it also isn't trivial. I'd say that it shouldn't keep most people working at it for longer than 5-6 minutes.

Both of these were sent to me by the guys over at Puzzle Master, and they have do have both of them in stock for a pretty meagre price. I wouldn't recommend paying shipping on just those two, but next time you put an order in I'd definitely consider sticking them in as well.