Here’s another thing, I couldn’t find anything about online. It’s a little puzzle called the Fantastic Island Game – obviously some mangled translation from Chinese, but it’s no simple or cheap puzzle. The peices have a nice feel and a lot of thought has been put into its design.
As you can see from the pics, you get 7 pieces (ala Tetris) that can be assembled into, get this, 124 different simplex pyramids (like the one I solved at the bottom). The mind’s activity during this ‘puzzling’ is quite refreshing to me. I know a little bit about how puzzles can be solved computationally, so sometimes I get bored with such things because I know the best way to solve some puzzles is to follow a rote set of actions. But, in general, we need to keep pushing ourselves to solve such puzzles if we wanna keep our wits about us (what I mean is, as we get older, we need to exercise that ol’ wetware).
Part of the freshness offered by this puzzle, is the 3-nature that the pieces congeal in. From my previous posts, one can see my fascination with ternary systems, and this is a great example. As you build the pyramid, pieces aren’t to the left/right of or above/below one another (as in the binary way of things we usually consider) but the interactions are harder to define.

Anyway, a lot of fun and getting good at this is good for ya – my humble opinion.