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Wednesday 16 January 2013

Gear Ball (Oskar / Meffert's)

A while back I wrote about a twisty puzzle called the Gear Cube designed by Oskar van Deventer. To this day it is still my absolutely favourite puzzle from the twist genre as it is such a fun puzzle to solve and it looks awesome. Recently Meffert's decided to produce a spherical version of the exact same puzzle, and how could I pass that up?
Gear Ball by Meffert's - Solved

As a puzzle it is essentially exactly the same as the original Gear Cube, so I won't go into that here as you can always check back on the previous post. The only real difference is that where on the Cube I had to add small stickers (Fisher Design) to the inner edge pieces, the Ball comes with those pieces already colour tiled along with all of the other pieces. So out of the box it is technically more difficult that the original Gear Cube.

I've played with (not solved) quite a few twisties now, and honestly this is one of the best turning mass produced puzzles I've come across thus far, which is especially surprising considering it a puzzle based on a geared mechanism! The pieces almost never catch each other, and the black ridges dividing the coloured faces make it nice and easy to quickly turn the sides back and forth. You can also easily remove the square plastic centre caps on each face to loosen or tighten the screws beneath if you feel to, but mine didn't require any fiddling at all.

I really think this is the kind of puzzle that anyone can enjoy, so if you don't already have one I'd suggest adding it to your list. It is currently available from several retailers including HKNowStore and of course Meffert's.


5 comments:

  1. Now stop doing the easy ones! Get out there and solve the Gear Cube Extreme! Then you can start on some proper twisty puzzles!

    Go on! You know you want to!

    Kevin
    Puzzlemad

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yup! I like this one too, definitely on the buy list.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Very colourful in the scrambled state

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  4. I also like twisty puzzles. It's really a fun to solve that kind of puzzles.Thanks for sharing such puzzles with us.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Tim - Fox Point, Wisconsin (US)6 August 2014 at 04:09

    I bought this last month, though I am afraid to take it out of the box. I've been putting more attention toward wooden lock and packing puzzles.

    ReplyDelete

No puzzle spoilers please!

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