Halfway through last year I restarted purchasing twisty puzzles after a
little hiatus (mostly induced by fear of how difficult the newer puzzles
looked). This batch I worked through gradually over a few weeks and
published about them
here
and
here
but the Master Clover cube caused me considerable anxiety...as an edge
turner it is going to jumble and to shape-shift which is normally a fun
challenge but with so many layers, this was potentially going to be painful.
If you are not familiar with the concept then let me quickly explain.
Normally with edge turning puzzles, the individual pieces are restricted in
their positions to certain orbits and cannot leave them. However, a jumbling
move occurs when a partial turn occurs of an edge which lines up the cuts
enough to allow an adjacent edge to be rotated. This can cause
shape-shifting if it isn't lined up with the opposite side or "just" take
pieces out of their usual orbits. Part of the attraction to me with these
edge turning puzzles is that there are two distinct solves to be done - a
non-jumbled scramble can be mostly solved using an entirely intuitive
approach without any fancy algorithms and just a bit/a lot of thought and
planning - this is great fun usually. Then a jumbling scramble makes for a
much tougher solve needing even more thought and often needs a more fancy
algorithm or commutator to solve (and half the fun is working out these
commutators). It also ends up with a hugely shape-shifted nightmare puzzle.
I had put off the final one in that batch until just this week. It
frightened me to death! I recalled that many years (2013) ago I had bought
and eventually solved the big brother of the Master Clover Cube, Eitan's
Master Curvy Copter
and the process it had nearly killed me. It was a seriously difficult puzzle
with a lot of shapeshifting and a hugely difficult set of commutators to
find.
Eventually after procrastinating a long time, I ended up discussing the
puzzle with
Derek who happened to be working on it at the same time. My fears seemed to
fall on deaf ears and, as usual, he started to badger me to get on with it
and eventually I succumbed when he practically screamed "DO IT" at me via FB
messenger. This shamed me into at least trying a non jumbling scramble in
the hope that it should be solvable by intuition:
I basically do it layer by layer working my way up from the white face.
The petals in the Master clover cube are split up so it was just a matter
of creating the white face (easy) and then assembling the 2 side faces of
the corner pieces and then adding in the half petals. With delight I
noticed that the centres and the corners are not separable so solving one
solves the other. It can be a little arduous but I managed to get half of
the puzzle solved really quite easily. I was on a roll and then I hit a
problem - the half petals in the remaining half are much harder to pair up
when there is very little room to play in. One of the most important
things I realised was that doing the puzzle layer by layer always ends up
with a scenario where there are single half petals that cannot be placed
in the end game without doing jumbling moves to finish. I was ever so
slightly disappointed in this but I should probably not have been
surprised. It was always going to be unlikely that such a complex puzzle
was going to end up with nice easy intuitive 3 cycles of pieces. Having
solved the lower half, I was able to turn the puzzle back to that
orientation and experiment with the jumbling moves to see what effect they
have. In a normal Curvy copter, the double jumble swaps a the two opposite
petals on adjacent faces as well as either side of the cube. This can
occur here but it is possible to split the inner and outer edge jumbles as
below:
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A single jumble swap
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Two jumble swaps
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Four jumble swaps on both layers
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As you can see that matching inner edges with the front outer edge swaps
4 petal pieces. Doing it twice swaps another 4 and then twice more
leaves in a very nice scenario (pictured right). Could I use this? Oh
yes, I was sure I had the puzzle beat...and then this happened:
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Hell! Not enough pieces swapped!
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I was stumped for ages. I tried every combination of jumbling that I could
think of and was always left with 2 pairs of swapped petal pieces. Time to
Think© - Ouch! that hurt. I eventually realised that I needed to swap 2
more pairs at the same time but not alter the faces. Think© you fool! Aha!
A lovely moment happened when I realised that I could move petals from the
bottom face onto each side and if they were swapped over in a double set
of jumbling moves then there was no mixing up of something else that I
didn't want mixed. YES! I had it solved layer by layer.
Reporting my success and struggle back to Derek, he replied that he had
not had anywhere near so much trouble as me with a non-jumbled scramble.
???How is that possible? It transpired that he had reduced it to a
standard Curvy copter first and this could be done without any jumbling
moves at all. I had to have a try and yes this was also a LOT of fun. So
many aspects to just one twisty puzzle. At this point we were both
procrastinating...he said that he had not had time to do a full jumbled
and shape-shifted scramble but practically shouted at me to get on with
it! Gulp! I am, of course, too stupid to say no to an instruction like
that so off I went. I note that Derek has still not fully scrambled his
copy!
First of all, I did a jumbled but not shape shifted scramble and at this
point I was very pleased that I had done my earlier experiments and gained
a lot of experience of what could be moved where - the solve took me a
couple of hours of enjoyable fun. Then it was time to screw my courage to
the sticking place and do it properly:
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This might have been a very bad idea!
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The shape-shifting does seem to get blocked at various points during the
scramble. It is mostly internal and does feel like it could be pushed
past. But my experience with the original Curvy copter plus warned me off
forcing anything. Everything I had learned about the puzzle up to that
point stood me in good stead. Returning to cube was no more than awkward
and then it was just a fully jumbled solve. I love this puzzle! It is
definitely less difficult than the Master curvy copter but in a way that
is a good thing. The vast majority of this can be solved by intuition
alone and then just a bit of experimentation using the already solved half
will provide what you need to be able to complete it. There are several
challenges (non-jumbled, reduction approach; non-jumbled, layer by layer,
jumbled non-shape shifted and finally fully scrambled) - this is great
value for money. I bought mine from the HKNowstore but for those of you in
America/Canada then
PuzzleMaster
have it in stock as well. Go on, give it a try, you will love it!
There are a couple of other non-face-turning Master cubes that would be
great if those wonderful cube producers would have a try at manufacturing:
The Master Curvy Copter I have shown and the Master Rex Cube as well would
be incredible:
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3 Master cubes - hopefully the back two will be mass-produced
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