Zobrist Cube

Great puzzle. You will progress to the more difficult combos pretty quickly. The instructions are kind of vague or just beyond layman's terms. The combinations are progressively more difficult. After you complete a puzzle, break it down and try it again. It seems to me the second attempt takes longer. The corners will get slightly flared from dropping the pieces onto the floor as you work them but it's nothing that a soft emory board can't take care of. I also enlarged the color code on the box using a 3X5 card & used a silver magic marker to highlight the pieces in the box, don't worry, you won't see them once the puzzle is properly assembled. Good way to keep sharp.

I like it a lot. But the idea for a game for 2 players doesn't make much sense. There is no guarantee this game will end successfully for either player. You can play hours with no end in sight. So do not be too excited about the game. I have another idea. Choose any configuration from the catalogue, and the players place any chosen tile trying to outsmart the opponent by placing the tile in a way that it is impossible for the opponent to fit next tile into 3x3x3 structure. It will be the win for him/her. Short, funny game. Try it.

I bought this as a birthday present for my 16 year old son who is into Rubik's cubes. The pieces are beautifully made and comes in an attractive and sturdy presentation box. We had a lot of fun racing against my son to build cubes. There are hundreds of different challenges ranked by their difficulty level. However, it takes a while to find the correct pieces because the embossed letters on each piece are hard to read. Also, the instructions were a little basic and needed a little more explanation to make the game more user friendly. There should be a couple of introductory paragraphs to explain the concept of the game. Otherwise, it is confusing. Overall, a fun and challenging game that will keep us busy for a while.

Zobrist Cube Game Edition. The set was incomplete. Obvious an error from the Zobrist factory. Can that be cleard with Zobrist?

If you have enjoyed Piet Hein's Soma Cube, invented in 1936, which has 240 distinct solutions, excluding rotations and reflections, using seven polycubes, you will really love Zobrist Cube, which is a fantastic set of 33 polycubes that come assembled as five 3x3x3 cubes. The assembled 3x3x3 cubes should be dissembled into 33 labeled polycubes. A code book provides an extensive list of valid puzzles using subsets of six or seven polycubes and the corresponding solutions. The difficulty level increases as the number of distinct solutions, excluding rotations and reflections, decreases. This can be played as a two-person game with each player picking a code from the code book for the other person to assemble. The difficulty increases as the number of solutions becomes fewer. The solution strategy is to use a back-tracking algorithm, that terminates rather quickly when there are many distinct multiple solutions. A solution manual is included with Zobrist Cube that provides a list of acceptable codes and corresponding solutions.

This is an interesting and challenging followup to Rubik's Cubes. It's more free form and open ended. And it requires more dexterity because the pieces are not attached. It takes a while to get used to the paradigm, but if things start to seem too easy, just flip to the next page in the book. You will soon move from routine to difficult to extremely difficult. One complaint is that it is unnecessarily difficult to identify which piece has which letter. They should make the letters easier to locate and read. They could also make each shape a different color. Or both! I guess if you play enough you will become totally familiar with the pieces, but I find that it takes almost as long to select the pieces for the different problem sets as it does to solve the puzzles.

This is the old soma puzzle with lots of variations. What's new is this challenges you to solve constantly new puzzles at ever faster speeds. But that's not a great puzzle compared to some others. It's a bit of nuisance to pick the right pieces every time using the guide book. It's a bit expensive for all the more that it is. Puzzle pieces are well constructed.

Neat game! Saw it in the Discover Magazine ad and wanted to give it a try. You can tell it was designed by a programmer, because the instructions booklet is very plainly written. I bought this for game night with my kids and so far, they put me to shame! Something about the way that 3D games have shaped their brains has seemingly made them geniuses at solving this game. What takes me 15 minutes to solve, my 13 year old son can do in less than 5. The online description is very brief. I should mention that the box has a nice magnetic closure and the pieces are pretty high quality plastic. They sound and feel a lot denser than I'd imagined from the picture and fit very solidly together.