Packing puzzles are typically very difficult types of puzzles to solve but ones with restricted openings are incredibly difficult!
This particular puzzle seemed to have started a trend and after multiple solutions found it spawned a family of them. I'm not aware of it being currently available at the moment so please send me a message if you find some!
Be sure to drop by the Pelikan workshop to see what's available!
Kevin Sadler wrote about it:
“This puzzle by Dr Latussek is a masterpiece! It is not for the fainthearted because it is seriously difficult but the eventual solution is simply superb! Anyone who is interested in packing puzzles needs this in their collection and should expect to spend a very long time on it. It is a ‘straightforward’ packing puzzle where 7 blocks need to be placed into a box. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Well yes, it should be since the pieces can pack into the volume inside the box in hundreds of ways (Burrtools found 2444 assemblies). The problem here is that like the incredible Casino puzzle (my favourite puzzle of 2018) the box has a lip on each side and the pieces need to be inserted through a slot. This restriction severely restricts the moves. Having taken it out of the box for the photo and failed over the first evening to get anywhere, I wanted to put it back in the box in the clever way it was supplied… with 2 pieces filling the top slot completely, just proud of the top surface – embarrassingly, I was unable to manage even that straight forward feat – it took me 2 days to work that out! Jakub did post about this one on Facebook a week or so ago and an interesting comment from Bernhard stated that this was an amazing mathematical puzzle. This did get me thinking and rather worried. I brought out my ruler and measured away – the puzzle is based on a 7mm voxel with every side of every piece being a multiple of 7. I started to work out the ways that a cube shape can be made with these pieces (the final cube is 9x9x9) but, having found a few, I realised that getting them into the box with that awkward lip was going to be very hard and a brute force approach was definitely not going to work. In order to get a review out in a timely manner, I asked for some help. A pdf was sent to me with the solution which confirmed that my original idea had been perfectly correct (I AM a genius) but I could not follow the solution to get the pieces inside and had to ask for help. A video later and it was packed! this is a stunning design… not for the faint-hearted.”
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