Recently* I was perusing the section on edge matching puzzles on Rob’s Puzzle Page. While puzzles using a 3×3 square grid are the most common, one that I found interesting was the 2×3 grid “Matador” puzzle, where matches form dominoes with doubled numbers of pips. Possibly to compensate for the reduction in size, an extra rule requires that not only must edges match, but one match must be present for each pip number between 0 and 6.
My first impulse was to find the simplest complete set that would work as a puzzle. There are 6 different cyclic permutations of a set of four different numbers. Why not try edge-matching with cards using these?
It turns out that this is a pretty easy and not terribly interesting puzzle.
However, in exploring the space of similar puzzles, I found what I think is a particularly elegant gem. If we use cards with edge values between 0 and 8, there are 17 different sums between 0 and 16, which is the same number as the number of internal edges in a 3×4 grid of 12 cards. Coincidentally, 12 is also the number of sets of different numbers between 0 and 8 that sum to 16, so those can be the sets of numbers on our 12 cards.
The last detail is the matter of how we arrange those numbers. Making all of the cards have clockwise ascending edge values is simple enough, although it hurt my symmetry senses to have to pick a direction. And indeed, we don’t have to, because we can make the cards flippable, so that the other sides have values in counterclockwise ascending order. Luckily, the flippable cards are just what the puzzle needed to handle another issue: without them, the puzzle would be unpleasantly hard to solve.
In addition to the collect-all-the sums puzzle, simply matching the numbers makes a good puzzle with this set:
A third challenge is to make a 4×4 square with the corners removed such that every difference between values at the same edge between 1 and 8 occurs exactly twice. I believe I solved this at some point, but I didn’t record the solution, so I can’t show it to you right now.
As you may have noticed, the last puzzle set has higher production quality than the first two. That’s because I’ve had a prototype custom deck of cards made including several different puzzle sets. I intend to have a small run of these made to sell.
*By recently, I mean, whatever was recently last June, when I started writing this post. I don’t mean to only finish blog posts during the earlier part of the year, but it does seem to tend to work out that way.
I am a huge fan of this kind of puzzle, and just recently, I’ve made a triangle version of it with some alterations.
First, instead of 0 to 8 pips, I chose to do 0 to 10 for this one. This means there are 21 sums between 0 and 20.
Second, I chose 15 as the sum of all pip values for each piece, resulting in 13 pieces. I’ve also made the pieces flippable like yours, and since there are only three edges, arrangement wasn’t a problem for me.
The challenges are almost the same as the square version, with the difference being that only 15 sums will be made instead of 21. To make up for the limitations, I’ve made a sum-collecting challenge where you need to find a solution with sums from 3 to 17. I might try doing solutions for 0 to 14 or 6 to 20, 1 to 15 or 5 to 19, and 2 to 16 or 4 to 18 if it’s also possible. Other than that, a same-number match solution is still achievable with triangles, let alone a solution where all sums are 10.