Aaron Bell

One of my little stocking stuffers at Christmas was this little geometric puzzle made from wood. It containes triangles, rhombuses, and squares in one of four different colors; red, blue, green and uncolored.

Interestingly, there isn’t an equal set of shapes for each color. The blue / uncolored ones have all the rhombuses and the green/red have all the squares. In addition, there are four more blue triangles than uncolored ones.

I found it was rather fun to make different little designs using the limitations of the space and kind of shapes. Course, at the same time, I wasn’t sure what to do! I think my first design was centered around creating one that had mirrored elements and colored. At the time, I just started putting pieces into the little holder and then composed from there.

Today, I thought I would play with it and see what sort of designs I could come up with. After making one style, I thought about doing something a with more limitations. My first concept was to see if it would be possible to create a design in which no two pieces of the same color shared a side. It was an interesting, but ultimately simple exercise.

It was easy to burn through the blue and uncolored pieces on the edges, so all I needed to do was figure out the middle. Of course, with less space and more tight controls on which pieces could go where, it came along quickly.

Next, I thought about creating a design in which none of the uncolored pieces touched the edge. This proved much more of a challenge, especially combined with the “no two connected pieces can share a color” rule I used in the previous challenge. I struggled with the lack of uncolored rhombuses for the outer edge. However, the most difficult issue I ran into was how to make the outer border fit into the containing box. In my attempts to prevent the uncolored pieces from touching the edges, I ended up using the different pieces in ways that prevented a clean edge to be formed. While I created some nifty designs, none of them were usable.

In frustration, I took a look at the photo I took of the first challenge. I realized that in order to create an edge that would properly fill the box, I needed a very particular set of pieces. As you can see, from the previous one, it was 4 rhombus sides and a triangle’s long side. Now, the rhombus edge is the same length as the short side of the triangle and the side of the square. Aha! A breakthrough at last. Now, armed with the knowledge of what I can and cannot have on the outer border, it became significantly easier to construct the outer edge and then build inward.

I thought the final design was kinda classy, though now I wish I had switched the red and green squares on the right side so that there was consistency in arrangement, but that’s ok! I was happy with how the blue and uncolored rhombuses came together in the middle to make the cross.

After completing this design, I wondered if it would be possible to prevent there from being any blue or uncolored pieces touching the edge. Turned out that it was pretty simple and just required a slight adjustment of the design.

Afterward, I thought I would do one last design in which all the pieces of the same color were connected to one another. After the long slog of the previous challenge, the ease of this one was rather refreshing. Ultimately, I thought the design ended up rather nicely too!

The only odd thing was that due to the additional blue triangles, it became impossible to create a totally mirrored design. All in all, it was a fun exercise.