The Tuttminx
Hey, everyone. It's me, back at it again with another blog post about puzzles. Recently, I made a very large order- I purchased close to 200$ worth of puzzles. I got some pretty cool ones, but none of them were cooler than this one, the Tuttminx:
The Tuttminx is a truncated icosahedral (32-sided or 32-faced) puzzle that functions similar to what you'd expect from a Rubik's cube. Each side is a unique color, just like the Rubik's cube- meaning it was a huge pain to sticker. It actually arrives in the mail with no stickers applied, and the user is expected to do this themselves. Now, I'm fine with this, but when you're working with 32 different colors, it can be very difficult to decide where you want them to go- if you're not careful, you can wind up with too many similar colors too close to each other (for example, I was given eight different shades of blue, and the task of keeping them as far apart as I could!).
The Tuttminx took me about two hours total to sticker. As of right now, I have no intentions to scramble it- because frankly, the thing is terrifying. I'd say it's probably my scariest looking puzzle, though not the hardest- the hardest would likely be my latch cube. Even so, a puzzle this large with this many different moving pieces would take several hours to solve, and that's time that I simply don't have right now. But hey, maybe some day!
For a little bit of background information, the tuttminx was designed by Lee Tutt, a puzzle designer who's invented several very interesting puzzles (Including the "void megaminx", a pentagonal-prism shaped puzzle, and an icosahedron). It's made up of 12 pentagonal and 20 hexagonal faces, and is made up of 32 center pieces, 60 corner pieces and 90 edge pieces, as well as the internal core. The total number of possible combinations for a tuttminx is, copied and pasted from Wikipedia, 1 232 507 756 161 568 013 733 174 639 895 750 813 761 087 074 840 896 182 396 140 424 396 146 760 158 229 902 239 889 099 665 575 990 049 299 860 175 851 176 152 712 039 950 335 697 389 221 704 074 672 278 055 758 253 470 515 200 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000. -or about 1.2325 septensexagintillion. And since you asked, yes, that's a real number- and a very large one. In fact, there are more possible combinations for a Tuttminx than there are subatomic particles in the universe.
That's all I've really got to say about the Tuttminx, really. If any of you are interested in buying one (yeah, right!), they run for about 55 bucks on thecubicle.us and I'll consider you really cool if you decide to do it. Either way, thanks for reading!
The Tuttminx is a truncated icosahedral (32-sided or 32-faced) puzzle that functions similar to what you'd expect from a Rubik's cube. Each side is a unique color, just like the Rubik's cube- meaning it was a huge pain to sticker. It actually arrives in the mail with no stickers applied, and the user is expected to do this themselves. Now, I'm fine with this, but when you're working with 32 different colors, it can be very difficult to decide where you want them to go- if you're not careful, you can wind up with too many similar colors too close to each other (for example, I was given eight different shades of blue, and the task of keeping them as far apart as I could!).
The Tuttminx took me about two hours total to sticker. As of right now, I have no intentions to scramble it- because frankly, the thing is terrifying. I'd say it's probably my scariest looking puzzle, though not the hardest- the hardest would likely be my latch cube. Even so, a puzzle this large with this many different moving pieces would take several hours to solve, and that's time that I simply don't have right now. But hey, maybe some day!
For a little bit of background information, the tuttminx was designed by Lee Tutt, a puzzle designer who's invented several very interesting puzzles (Including the "void megaminx", a pentagonal-prism shaped puzzle, and an icosahedron). It's made up of 12 pentagonal and 20 hexagonal faces, and is made up of 32 center pieces, 60 corner pieces and 90 edge pieces, as well as the internal core. The total number of possible combinations for a tuttminx is, copied and pasted from Wikipedia, 1 232 507 756 161 568 013 733 174 639 895 750 813 761 087 074 840 896 182 396 140 424 396 146 760 158 229 902 239 889 099 665 575 990 049 299 860 175 851 176 152 712 039 950 335 697 389 221 704 074 672 278 055 758 253 470 515 200 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000. -or about 1.2325 septensexagintillion. And since you asked, yes, that's a real number- and a very large one. In fact, there are more possible combinations for a Tuttminx than there are subatomic particles in the universe.
That's all I've really got to say about the Tuttminx, really. If any of you are interested in buying one (yeah, right!), they run for about 55 bucks on thecubicle.us and I'll consider you really cool if you decide to do it. Either way, thanks for reading!
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