Description
This amazing burr puzzle has always been known as The Philippe Dubois Burr puzzle although he’s not actually credited as the puzzle designer. The designer remains unknown. In Jerry Slocum’s book Puzzles Old & New published in 1988 he describes the puzzle as “Found in 1985 in Israel by famous puzzle enthusiast Philippe Dubois”
This puzzle is one of the group of interlocking puzzles called burr puzzles – it has internal voids and no solid locking piece which differentiates it from less difficult puzzles with the same external shape. It has just six pieces but it is firmly in our Very Difficult puzzles category.
The degree of difficulty of this puzzle is because the internal voids and no solid locking piece means that there is room for 7 sliding moves to remove the first block in the puzzle. Don’t forget that’s 7 sliding moves to get the last piece back in when you’re putting it back together! Combine that with a unique solution and yes, it’s very hard!
The puzzle is made from solid polished aluminium. Very accurately made using a CNC Mill so the fit will always be perfect. They feel amazing to play with as each move clicks into place smoothly and precisely.
They are very shiny so over time you might be able to mark these puzzles with constant use but you’ll never be able to break them! And a quick polish and they’ll be back shiny again.
Size: Each block is 22mm x 22mm x 66mm long.
Wil Strijbos does not supply solutions with his puzzles. He really believes that you will get much more puzzling enjoyment if you’re not easily tempted to peek.
Especially in his earlier puzzling days Brian’s favourite type of puzzles were high level multiple move burrs. As a bit of fun he decided to see what would happen if you mixed the pieces from each of the 10 move Peter Marineau Burr and the 7 move Phillipe Dubois burrs. For the Burr Geeks out there, according to BurrTools there are 23,396 possible assemblies and from those there are 8,603 solvable burrs. Brian says there are some very interesting level 5 & level 4 disassemblies that are also worth puzzling over but the two highest levels are still these two original designs. Then of course, once you’ve finished mixing them there’s the puzzle of knowing which pieces went into making the two original burrs!
If you want to try some more puzzling we do have a special offer to buy both puzzles at a discounted price.
Footnote: Philippe Dubois died in May 2019. A huge loss for the puzzle community. His company Gaby Games designed and made a variety of ingenious and complex puzzles.
What others are saying
There are no contributions yet.