Quintress

Description

How it works: This puzzle consists of a two-sided board and 24 individual small pieces.  There are two challenges.  The easiest is to fit 20 of the 24 pieces into the smaller sized side of the frame.  The pieces can be flipped and rotated as needed to fill available spaces on the board.  With some luck, your arrangement will fill the entire board with no empty spaces.  There are multiple solutions, although it is not a trivial effort to find one!

For an additional challenge, flip the board over and find an arrangement to fit all of the pieces into the 11×11 frame.  There will be one small empty space left somewhere on the board.  An ideal solution would put the empty spot in the very center of the board, but the puzzle inventor has not found that solution yet.  (In fact, the first person to send in a solution that has the hole in the middle will get a refund on their puzzle and their name on the website [if they want it].)

Story behind the puzzle: Inspired by the Tetris game, I began working out all of the unique arrangements for connecting 5 squares together into a single shape. (Tetris uses all of the combinations of 4 squares together.)

I found that there were 12 shapes possible, if you were allowed to flip the pieces over. I then built a wooden frame and made two each of the 12 shapes. The challenge was similar to that detailed above, to fill a 10×10 frame with 20 of the pieces or to use all to fill an 11×11 frame on the opposite side with one empty space remaining.

One evening, while checking into a hotel, I noticed a pattern of overlapping circles in the lobby carpet, and I suddenly saw my puzzle in a new light! For this combination of shapes, there are 21 unique pieces, but by making 2 each of the X, V, and W shaped pieces, I was able to replicate the two goals of my wooden puzzle. I could have easily made a printed version of the square puzzle, but I liked the resulting pattern of the completed puzzle with the overlapping circles.

What about the name? Since the first version was an expansion of Tetris, I figured that it made sense to call it Quintris (tetra=4; quint=5). But what to do when the composition is made of circles rather than squares? I considered some ridiculous options like, Qintricle, Quintircle, or even Quintricular, but felt those were a little too obscure. When I worked up my drawings initially, I had forgotten that Tetris ended with “is” and had used Quintress already, so I decided that made for an elegant version of the puzzle and would work for me.