Creative Crafthouse - Soma cube (craftsman edition)

Another puzzle I bought from Creative Crafthouse was a rather nice medium sized Soma cube made from rubberwood, stored in a matching well made box.

All puzzle collections should include a Soma cube!

I had one made from mahogany when I was a kid and I have no idea what happened to it! Whenever I have happened to be near gadget shops or toy stores I have idly looked to see if I could find a replacement but until now have never seen one. Whilst at the CC webstore I saw that they have quite a few different styles and sizes available - I decided I liked the look of their Craftsman edition which is made from a lovely fine-grained rubberwood. The Soma cube is a classic puzzle 1st designed by the Danish author Piet Hein in 1933 (for many years it was thought that he had designed it in 1939) during a lecture by Heisenberg (the father of quantum physics!!).

The large 3 x 3 cube is formed from 27 cubelets which  are joined together into 7 shapes.

There are 240 ways of assembling these shapes back into a cube (although if one was to try this manually, I have no idea how you would keep a record of which you had found!!). It is not particularly difficult but does require some thought.

The biggest attraction of this puzzle is that there are 1000s of other shapes that can be made from the pieces using any number of them. Many cubes come with booklets of shapes to try (the one from CC did) and there are a large number of puzzles available on the internet. So far I have only tried a small number of these puzzles and they are generally much harder than the cube.

The premiere site for the puzzles is Thorlief's Soma site.

I say again that All collections should have a Soma cube and Creative Crafthouse is a great place to buy from. They have a huge stock of other puzzles to tempt you with. I have some plans but neither you nor my wife need to know just now!!!!